No one wants to get fired. It’s not easy to get fired, and it’s also not easy to fire someone. Seven years ago, I was laid off due to the big recession. Sometimes, people don’t differentiate getting downsized due to recessions/overall company layoffs or actually getting let go because of performance, but I think that either way, it’s a pretty miserable experience. I’ll never forget how terrible I felt the morning it happened. It’s funny because I actually had anticipated it for weeks and had even cleaned up my desk and taken home all my belongings two weeks before. I had already started applying for new jobs. But on the day, I still cried and felt unloved, unneeded, and like no one cared about me. I felt like a complete failure. My friends and family called to comfort me. My roommate held me when I got home. But I still felt useless and unneeded.

So, I thought about this throughout today as I prepared to let someone on my team know her employment would be terminated, effective today. It had been a long time coming; she’d dictated to everyone else what days she’d choose to take the liberty to work remotely, was argumentative when I asked her to come into the office during normal office hours during work days, and consistently tried to tell her teammates that she knew better than they did because she’d been at the company longer. She refused feedback constantly and perceived everything as an attack. But despite all this, I felt terrible because I knew how she would feel. She would feel betrayed, like I had pretended to help her since her performance improvement plan but had never really intended to at all. She’d feel like we never appreciated her hours and devotion to the company. She’d feel worthless the way I felt seven years ago when I got laid off. Regardless of whether it’s true or not, she’d feel like she did not deserve this and that she’d done nothing wrong.

It’s cliche, but I’ve learned a lot since that day I got laid off. I learned that my loyalty to a company should never be that deep because frankly, loyalty is dead today. People don’t get pensions anymore; time devoted to a company is now meaningless. I learned that I can’t fully trust anyone I work with while we are still at the same company or in our current partnership, that there would always be things I wouldn’t know that would have the potential to harm me (two minutes before she came downstairs for our final meeting, she went into my manager’s manager’s office and asked him, “If you knew I was getting fired, you’d tell me, right?” He said, of course!). You can be friends with your colleagues; no one is arguing against that. But you should also be very careful what you say, especially when it has to do with the company or others who work there.

I also learned exactly how important perception is; just because you think you work hard doesn’t necessarily mean anyone else thinks you work hard; you need to make that shit obvious. Also, working hard doesn’t mean working longer hours; it means working smarter and more efficiently. Oftentimes in this brainwashed American society we live in, we confuse working hard with working long hours, which is so flawed and simply stupid.

I feel bad for her, and I know she cried on her way out. But I do hope she saw this as a learning experience as cliched as it is, and that she does try to improve herself in her next role. I don’t wish ill will on anyone. Although I still deal with my own trust issues, I really do wish the best for everyone I know, even if I absolutely cannot stand them. Some people I know will never improve (mostly my family, sadly), but it doesn’t mean I don’t still hope for positive change.