HI. On this rainy Saturday morning I am thinking about a conversation I had last night with my friend MH who was unceremoniously fired from a part time, 'commissions only' job. I think it stung her a bit. I was going to regale her with my war stories but thought better of it at that point. Sometimes it is better to listen to another than talk about oneself. My first firing was at Kmart. They placed me in the Garden Department and asked if I knew how to run a forklift. How hard could that be? I got there on bike and knew how to ride those, why couldn't I operate a fok lift? As luck would have it, my second day there an elderly couple came in needing railroad ties. I fired up the forklift and tried to head in the proper direction. After taking out a few feet of chain link fence and making an elderly couple run in terror, I was called to the Human resources office. Buh bye. My Senior year of College was interesting because I had fulfilled all of my requirements by my Junior year. My advisor sent me to look for an internship in the Art/Communications field. I found one at WCAU on City Avenue here in PA. I was either naive or a pistol back then and when asked to chauffeur bosses kids to and from train stations, be a coffee boy or perform other mundane tasks having nothing to do with art I simply refused. I decided to teach myself as much as I could within the Art Department as no one else there had time to and was written up while editing graphics, written up while sitting in on a Jane Whitney talk show about anorexia, and written up sitting in on voice over recordings, although they used my "fly with the angels..." blurb for years. After having been handed that pretty pink piece of paper I ended up re-writing my University Student Handbook and received my degree. Then, while working as a full time Designer I supplemented my income by working at a WAWA. One night a masked guy came in with a rifle to rob me. Working two full time jobs can be tiring, and just before midnight I may not have been as awake as I could have. I thought that someone was playing a prank as it was so surreal. He demanded money and I told him to get a f*ing real job like everyone else. Then he hit the register with his rifle and made another demand. I chose to hand him the metal boxes below the counter that held rolled coinage. He was gloveless, took the metal tray and then it hit him what I had done and he threw down the tray and ran. Buh bye! The next week friends came in to WAWA around closing time drinking beers. Boy Scout that I am, I told them they couldn't drink inside so I threw the remaining beer in the trash. (if that isn't alcohol abuse, nothing is). The following morning I was called in to WAWA and fired for drinking on the job. I explained to them that if I was, in fact, drinking on the job the beer cans would have been empty. Again, buh bye! I have had my own business for two decades and wonder if I could ever work for someone else again. I hope I never have to make that choice. It's not fun to be fired. On this day in 1959 the Soviet Union fired a large rocket,Lunik II, at the moon.
"I could never have imagined that firing 67 people on national television would actually make me more popular, especially with the younger generation." Donald Trump
