If you have to fire someone at a small company, the process is pretty straightforward, informal, just point and shoot. It goes something like, “Hey man, I’m gonna have to let you go. I’m giving your job to my girlfriend’s son, he’s kind of a dumbass, but I’ll get more sex this way. Sorry. But it works out kinda good because you’re not eligible for paid vacation until your 366th consecutive day on the job and you’ve worked here 364 days, so no vacation check, sorry. It’s not personal, oh ya, today’s your last day, I mean right now’s your last day. We would have taken you to a last-day lunch but the guy replacing you will be here in fifteen minutes. I feel bad, here’s twenty bucks, go get Bunch-A-Lunch at Shakey’s. Good luck bro.”

Firing people works differently at a big company, it’s more awkward (If you can believe that) and complicated.

For months we knew that there would be layoffs, not really catastrophic, but painful just the same, one part of the business had an unforeseen dropoff and we needed to cut operating expenses. You never know who’s gonna get it and if you think it can’t happen to you, that will be the day you get it.

My boss told me, “I need two people from your department,” meaning that I had to identify two people from my group to be canned. “I need the names tomorrow,” he said. I gave him the two names and it felt like betrayal, like conspiring behind one’s back, like plotting a crime against someone you know, like selling out a friend.

So I knew who would be fired but I didn’t know exactly how or when. I had been both the fired and the firer multiple times before, but each time the rules and the logistics were a little bit different and now the pending execution caused a certain degree of anxiety. I wondered to myself about whether it is worse to be fired or to fire somebody else. In the end, it seemed clear that getting fired was far worse because, well, you were now unemployed and your self-esteem goes in the shitter and unemployment is the first step toward divorce and homelessness and starvation and public humiliation. Still, when you get fired at least there’s no anticipatory angst because you rarely know it’s coming and there’s not the guilt or stomach-churning that goes along with having to tell a coworker, sometimes a friend, that he or she is now on the brink of divorce and homelessness and starvation and public humiliation.

A month or so went by and I was aware that these two people were gonna get fired, dead men walking as it were. I thought that if I was really a friend, a standup guy, that I should give them a heads up so that they wouldn’t get blindsided, so they could get a jump on finding a new gig while they still had one. But that would have been against company policy and protocol and what if, since they knew they were gonna get it, they walked into work one day with a weapon or poison donuts or an I-don’t-give-a-fuck-what-are-you-gonna-do-fire-me attitude? I couldn’t be a cool guy and tell them in advance, so I did the most mature thing I could think of – I avoided them. Avoided eye contact, avoided being in the same meetings as them and avoided any form of communication because how could I casually talk to them without guilt or insincerity when I knew they were gonna get fired?

Finally, the word started to spread that the day of the big layoffs was going to be Friday. A person from human resources contacted me and told me she would sit in on the dismissals with me. She said I would handle the telling-them-they-were-fired part and she would take care of explaining the financials, benefits and parting terms. She gave me a two-page script that the company had prepared, three or four paragraphs of excuses and preamble and then a legally-pure mention of, well, you’re fired. It wasn’t clear if she expected me to play this according to script, they didn’t say and I didn’t ask.

The HR gal was on a whirlwind firing tour that Friday and was scheduled to send employees packing at thirty-minute intervals from dawn till dusk. Everyone in the company knew that Friday was D-day, managers were avoiding the employees on death row and employees were avoiding their managers. I obsessed about every detail of the dirty deed, especially about the specifics of how the employees would actually arrive in my office at the allotted time. What if they called in sick that day? What if they had a meeting at the specific time they were supposed to be getting fired? What if they asked what I wanted when they were asked to join me in my office? My HR wingman said not to worry about it.

I was worried about. These were people I liked, and while this was all business, I wanted to be honest and have the whole thing be as dignified as possible.

The first guy, a tall long-haired dude, was scheduled to be fired at 10:30AM, unbeknownst to him. This guy worked here way before me, about ten years. The HR gal sent me to over to his desk to get him. He wasn’t there. Most people trickle in late and slowly on a Friday. I shifted gears and walked over to the desk of the next victim, a woman in her late thirties. She was single, Eastern European and I liked her okay and she tolerated me. She wasn’t at her desk either. I returned to my office and shot the shit with Mrs. HR for about fifteen minutes. The overall feeling was a mix of being in a dentist’s office before a root canal and sitting alone in a restaurant anxiously waiting for your girlfriend to show up so you can break up with her.

It’s now 10:40 and I walk back over to the male employee’s desk. Fuck! He’s sitting there with his back to me. I ask him if has a minute to join me in my office. It was a very clumsy, awkward walk. I was the prison guard walking in front of the prisoner on the way to the gas chamber. I think of making small talk, but that would be lame, so we walk silently, single file, he the victim, me the perpetrator. When I introduce him to the girl from HR whom he’s never met, the jig is up instantly. The script sits in front of me but there doesn’t seem to be any point in preliminaries, he knows, I know, so just lop off the limb in one quick blow. “You probably know that the company has announced a round of layoffs … You’re one of ’em.” I might barf, he might cry.

At the end, I give him a fantastically bungling and inappropriate bro hug and as he sulks away I get up to fetch my next appointment. Pretty much the same sequence of uncomfortableness happens with her, but she’s looking straight down, brooding, executing us one by one in her mind. When asked if she has any questions she doesn’t respond. We asked if she is okay, “Fine, can I go now?” Good times.

It could have been worse. In one of the other firing offices where an older gal was being fired she didn’t say a word, just gave the firer the finger, right in his face, about an inch from his nose, for over thirty seconds I’m told … waved it back and forth for emphasis like she was brandishing a handgun.

I guess we’re all motherfuckers at some point. Friday was my turn.