Is it better to be fired by phone or face to face?
Getting the bad news at the office doesn't change the facts
It's my great hope it never happens to you, but most of us have been there at some point. If you were about to lose your job, would you prefer:
A. Finding out via an e-mail or phone call to your home.
B. Getting called into the boss's office so the news can be delivered in person.
Journalist Steven A. Smith recently posted an entry titled, "A little humanity, please," in which he told of hearing "more horror stories from newspaper people . . . about the cruel, inhumane ways they are being fired or laid off."
Smith says when there's no face-to-face communication, "It's a chicken - - - - approach . . . in tough times, don't we need to exercise more humanity, not less?"
It's a well-reasoned, thoughtful argument -- but I'm not so sure the in-person dismissal is any more humane.
First, there's the humiliation factor. You come to work, you settle in at your desk -- and then your boss or someone from human resources tells you you're gone, and you've got an hour to clean out your things under the watchful eye of a security guard.
Do you really want to hear the "budget cut" speech from the supervisor or the HR person, who must be hating her job at this point because she has to be the bearer of life-shattering news again and again?
I posed the question to my Facebook friends on Wednesday. More than 90 percent chose option B. As Facebooker Lisa Espinosa Landvogt put it, "Call me into the office and look me in the eyes."
I think the only semi-acceptable way to get laid off is if someone hands you a giant bag of cash and six fresh job leads.
Unless you're a serious baseball fan, you might not be familiar with the name of Alex Rios, a good-but-not great right fielder for the Toronto Blue Jays.
Rios, 28, is a .286 career hitter with single-season highs of a .302 average, 24 homers and 85 RBI. He's a solid player.
Although Rios isn't in the same league (so to speak) as Albert Pujols or Justin Morneau, he's making $6.4 million this year to play a kid's game, and he is often approached by autograph-seeking fans.
In ancient times, if a surly ball player such as Ted Williams brushed off a kid seeking an autograph, it probably wouldn't even make the papers.
In YouTube times, such incidents are often captured on video. That's just what happened to Mr. Rios recently.
Rios was leaving a gala for the Blue Jays' charity foundation (duly noted) when he reportedly brushed off a kid who had asked for his autograph. (Earlier that day, Rios had gone 0-for-5 with five strikeouts, so he wasn't in the greatest mood.)
An adult male calls out, "The way you played today Alex, you should be lucky someone wants your autograph."
Rios retorts: "Who gives a f - - -? Who gives a f - - -?"
"You're a bum!" bellows the fan.
"F - - - you!" responds Rios, who is about to get into his Mercedes.
"You forget where you come from!" says the guy.
The guy who heckled Rios was among those waiting to get a glimpse of the players that night. One assumes if Rios had stopped and signed, the same guy would have been saying, "You're the best, Alex!"
As you'd expect, Rios has issued an apology for the incident.
"I want to apologize to my fans, to the team, to my teammates because it was something I should never have done," Rios said the other day. "It was a bad reaction. . . . It was a long day, I couldn't help the team win, and it was just bad. . . . I just lost my cool in that situation, and it was bad."
All-American Twitterer Ashton Kutcher recently jumped into the debate with a tweet saying, "Truth ... autographs R annoying," earning Kutcher the wrath of fans and Perez Hilton. Kutcher backtracked, tweeting, "if ppl ask & I'm not late 4 something, it's cool."
Not to excuse Rios, but the truth is celebrities can't win the autograph game. You sign for 100 fans -- and the three fans who don't get an autograph run to their laptops and blog a thousand words about how you snubbed them. You pose for dozens of photos with fans -- and then TMZ catches you blowing off some semi-stalker who isn't satisfied with the two pictures he's already taken with you.
The real question is why yet another generation of fans wants that autograph. I can understand the desire to capture a quick cell-phone shot -- but the scribbling of the name on a piece of paper? What do you do with it once you've obtained it?
Perhaps more celebs should take a cue from Steve Martin, who for years would hand out a business card that read:
"This certifies you have had a personal encounter with me and that you found me warm, polite, intelligent and funny."