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2014-10-05 09:48:58
By Maria Atanasov
Have you taken one for the team, been given the pink slip, eased out,
reorganised, made redundant, axed, or invited to be successful elsewhere
? Call it what you will, they all point to one thing: You re sacked.
Yep, there are some pretty creative ways to show someone the door. We looked to
question-and-answer site Quora to find the most creative euphemisms for
layoffs. This is what respondents had to say.
Downright rude
It s never easy to hear that you ve been let go, nor is it easy for most
managers to be the bearer of the bad news. But some have more tact than others.
One of my dad's friends said to a guy: I don't know how this office would run
without you! But as of Monday, I'm going to find out , wrote Tracey Bryan.
Equally insensitive, wrote Richard Brasser, is a line used periodically by a
business owner he knows: I had to shoot another hostage today. The team was
getting a little complacent.
And when John Bagnall lost his job at EMI Records, he was told, We ve
decided your outlook and talents are ideally suited to the freelance sector ,
he wrote.
Beware the dreaded ized
To soften the blow, some managers avoid the dreaded downsize but use its
particular construction. Take rightsized, for example. Rightsizing" wrote
Robert Rapplean, is a way of avoiding saying downsizing. When the managers
would hold onto their jobs by laying off all of the actual workers, we would
call that capsizing.
Lorna Hughes knows a friend who was told she'd been let go because the company
was being smartsized, which seem especially cruel, she wrote. Not only are
they firing you but they're telling you they're smart to do so.
Richard Careaga recalls he first synergised and then graduated when his
company was absorbed by a bigger player. It was one of those all of a sudden
things where me and my 50,000 buddies were swallowed up by our new 250,000
friends, he wrote. In an organisation that big all you can hope to control
(at least temporarily) is headcount and for the most part the guys at former
[headquarters] were a bucket of unsorted spare parts to unneeded machinery.
Still, it stung.
And when Nortel Networks experienced mass layoffs in 2001, the company did not
rightsize, downsize, or smartsize anyone, wrote Troy Turner, then a manager at
the company. Nortel OPTIMISED 65,000 people! (Yes, that included me and all
my peers, our bosses, and even their bosses, & their.... )
Deciphering corporate jibberish
When in doubt as to what to say, some mangers just defer to corporate jargon.
My favourite, wrote Andy Micone, was realigning our resources to our
corporate strategy. That's right, they told people that they weren't being
laid off but were simply no longer in alignment. If you felt like a cog in a
corporate machine yesterday...
Meanwhile, George Andre said he s heard a fair share of convoluted euphemisms,
including "recycling our creative pool, maximising our throughput by
streamlining our workforce and rethinking our future, he wrote.
Out with a quack
Even when employers try to be diplomatic, layoffs can foster home-grown
euphemisms, where the employees themselves coin a term for job cuts.
At one Fortune 500 company, a manager was known for walking up to people
seemingly at random and say You doing anything this afternoon? I have some
stuff I want to chat with you about. Let s go take a walk around the duck pond,
Micone wrote. We noticed people leaving to go for a walk with this manager
would never return. Soon the catch-phrase for layoffs was a walk around the
duck pond.