My boss fired me over WhatsApp while he was on vacation in Honolulu
Today I got fired from one of my jobs. My boss was kind enough to interrupt his vacation in Honolulu just to send me a WhatsApp message and politely let me know that my services would no longer be needed.
Except that’s not exactly how it went down. In fact, it was much worse.
I had messaged my boss to ask about my tasks for this month, after two weeks of bugging the project manager because my to-do list was completely empty.
Weird. My to-do list was never empty. Suddenly there was nothing to do, and we were already halfway through the month. Something was definitely off.
So I wrote directly to my boss on Slack to see if something unusual was going on. Hours went by with no reply. Two days went by, still nothing.
This morning I messaged his personal number on WhatsApp… and he answered. He sent me a screenshot of our chat where, oddly enough, the only thing visible was the last message I had sent him: a simple “thank you” after asking for a reply. Strange, again. Since when do Slack messages just disappear on their own?
No big deal, because in my Slack thread all the messages were still there. So I sent him a screenshot, and that’s when my poor boss had to set aside his piña colada and write a long, dramatic message on WhatsApp, breaking the unfortunate news.
He said he was letting me go because my department was the most expensive in the agency, and that last month the company closed in the red for the very first time. He told me, very sadly, that he even had to take out a loan to pay his mortgage, and that cutting costs was the only way to keep the agency alive. All of this, of course, from his vacation in Hawaii.
A true tortured soul, struggling to pay his mortgage and doing the impossible to keep his agency afloat. His story moved me so much that I actually felt guilty for charging him for my work all this time. If I had only known how hard it was for him to pay for his house and his trip to Honolulu, I would’ve gladly worked for free.
In fact, I swear that after reading such valid reasons for my dismissal, I even felt bad for expecting an explanation after two weeks of silence, wondering if I still had a job. I shouldn’t have bothered him. Poor guy.
I actually felt so much empathy for him that I forgot I was being fired over WhatsApp —through a message— after four years of working together. I completely forgot that he didn’t even have the courage to schedule a video call to give me the news. But I get it, he was going through such a tough time with the whole mortgage thing and his month in the red.
So I apologized for bothering him. I begged him to let me keep working for him, even if it was just for a few cents. Because I want him to be able to finish paying off his house. I want to know that at least through my work, I contributed to my boss’s happiness and wealth.
For me, there’s no greater privilege than knowing he’ll never again have a losing month at his agency.
I just hope that someday my boss can forgive me and give me another chance to make him richer, without expecting anything in return, not even the tiniest bit of empathy or courage it takes to fire someone while looking them in the eye.