Suck It: Unemployment by Email

One of the hidden downsides to the technological turn is that now cowardly bosses don't have to face the workforce they're forcibly ejecting from their professions. In fact, they don't have to face that this is what they're doing; it's "downsizing" or "budget crisis" or even, frighteningly, "modernizing." This is in no way a new phenomenon, but the explosion of digital media communications has only normalized this already dehumanizing and corporatizing trend. In much the same way that politicians have long been able to hide from public scrutiny via media exposure behind the mask of a press office, now employers at all levels can hide behind a new smoke-screen: the computer screen.

As if pink slips with your paycheck weren't impersonal enough, we now have eliminated the paychecks by turning them into automatic deposits--and then eliminated the pink-slips too by making the whole thing able to take place purely in digital interactions. First comes the mass email about budgetary woes. Then comes the complaints of policy changes and uncertainty, in the form of a deluge of emails, many incomprehensible. Next, a personal-seeming email expressing concern for your particular situation (insert your name here) arrives. Then it comes. Subject line: Budget Cuts.

The next week, you're erased from the payroll system. Your number--the only way you're recognizable to the entity you've worked for and depended on more than you'd like to admit begins grinding its slow and unpredictable way through the outsourced bureaucracy of COBRA--somewhere in Texas, or maybe Mumbai. Another email comes, reminding you to clear your office, or return your keys, or relinquish your parking pass, or some other impersonal-and-therefore-all-the-more-demeaning demand. You're now a detail to be cleared, a process to complete. You're deleted.

Economic strife and unemployment affect everybody. Job elimination is a reality for many employers, the virtuous and the wicked alike. Part of the reason that managers and administrators make the very good livings that they make (particularly relative to their staffs) is because they have the duty to handle these issues, the unpleasant task of keeping things running smoothly and on-budget. That includes handling staffing at all levels. When someone is let go, either for cause or for budget, notification is part of the duty of management. And when a job disappears for reasons that have nothing to do with the former employee, the bare minimum that employee deserves is an exit interview and the opportunity to hear directly from those for whom they worked directly the reasons for their termination.

Email hiring and firing allows those charged with hiring and firing to hide from the human faces of their decisions. It buys into the false and destructive metaphor that people are nothing more than raw materials, "human resources" to be squabbled over, claimed, mined, and then discarded--that there is no relationship there, no consciousness worthy of consideration or concern. It's dehumanizing, ultimately, to parties on both sides. By treating others as not worthy of human recognition, employers diminish their own humanity as well.

In other words: anyone who has ever terminated an employee by email should SUCK IT.

Quick Suck: this week's 10

people, places and things pissing me off this week include:

1. Anyone who begins articulating an opinion by stating "I consider myself a feminist, but..."
2. Giant Jackie O/Vegas Elvis sunglasses
3. English-only fucktards.
4. People who don't know the sound of their own car alarm and so let them go off on a regular basis, blithely irritating and disrupting entire residential neighborhoods.
5. Wearers of faux-hawks.
6. People who walk their dogs while keeping them on unreasonably tight leashes or in choke-chains.
7. Lousy tippers who act like they have an ideological beef with tipping instead of admitting their own cheapness.
8. Charlatans who undermine the credibility and therefore insurability and usability of homeopathic and natural medicine by exploiting the desperate and credulous.
9. Britney haters.
10. Everyone in any way linked to the commercial revivals of tube tops, jumpsuits, harem pants, ass-baring shorts, spray tans, tooth bleaching, boob jobs, dating old guys and marrying for money.

Another Quick Suck: 10 more that should Suck It

1. College and university students who wear licensed, merchandised T-shirts bearing the image of Che Guevara.
2. Women over the age of 25 who think that being called a girl is a compliment.
3. People who post medical photos on Facebook, MySpace and other public sites without warning. I shouldn't have to encounter the contents of your colon or uterus without consent, people.
4. Anyone who can afford better beer but drinks Pabst Blue Ribbon because they think it's hilarious and ironic.
5. Textbook publishers who put out a new edition of their books every two years, even when nothing substantial has changed in the content, gouging students and hamstringing teachers.
6. The University of California again, some more.
7. Fickle Obamaniacs who fell in love with him based on nothing and then out of love over nothing.
8. Students who both ignore instructions and aren't skilled enough to accomplish simple tasks without detailed instructions to guide them.
9. Parents who live vicariously through their kids, whether it be by pushing their children to accomplish the things they've failed to do or putting up pictures of the kids on social networking sites to avoid having to show the world what they look like these days.
10. People who pronounce nuclear as nukular. After the entire Cold War, you still can't figure that one out? Then stop talking.