Fired for having a penis
May 31, 2007 by John in Humor, Of a Personal Nature, Ranting and Whining
I worked for a small family-owned company where myself and my coworker were referred to as the office girls. Im not a girl. I’m certainly not THEIR girl. Women work in the office, men work in the trucks. Men are superior. That is where I worked. So, me being the independent, modern, twenty-something that I am… this didnt float well with me. When one of the supervisors not MY supervisor, mind you strutted into the room and said, “Okay girls, we need to get something straight.” I knew what kind of conversation that would be. Needless to say, he treated us like we were his office bitches and then left. I was a tad bit upset.
At first I chuckled. Then I remembered that I too was “laid off” once, ostensibly, for having a penis. I was the only male in the publications department at MACTEC in 1995-96. There was someone in a different department who was a troublemaker (this was my first job out of college so I wasn’t the PITA that I am now - I was just happy to have a job in a field somewhat near my degree). To get rid of this troublemaker they engineered a “lay off of 10%,” which meant four people, including me. Lo and behold, a couple weeks later, the wife of the company vice president, who was trying to start her own graphic design (well, glorified desktop publishing) business, “stepped in” to “pick up the slack” left by my departure.
So much like the guy in the story above, I was let go from a department full of women and replaced by a woman. In the end I was better off, of course, but it did set my career and goals back quite a bit as I started my only real period of unemployment since high school.