I Am Dead
by Adam Kotsko
As some of
you know, I was suffering from a sore throat for a while recently. I
thought that it was a relatively minor problem, amounting to little
more than losing my voice, and I assumed that taking a day off from
waiting tables would allow me enough time to recover completely. I
called in sick to work, then promptly got in bed and disconnected my
phone, so as not to be disturbed. My boss apparently attempted to
call me several times, suspicious about my excuse for missing work,
and by the time I had nearly recovered and reconnected my phone, my
boss, Glen, was livid. He called on Friday night and left a message
alerting me that I wasn't sick and that I was fired. The decision had
been made long before he even called me, so reasoning with him was
completely out of the question. I accepted the humiliation
graciously, and the next day I washed all my uniform items and took
them over to work so as to avoid a hefty fine on my last paycheck, as
well as to avoid having a bunch of stupid aprons.
I arrived at about 2:00 PM, the slowest time in a restaurant, but I found that the parking lot was crammed full of police cars. I parked in the employee lot and rang the back doorbell, although I think some of the police officers were trying to discourage me for some reason. The dishwasher, Bob, opened the door, holding a gun. Bob had been working at the restaurant for many years and was used as a jack-of-all-trades, so I assumed that he was just cleaning out Glen's gun. As I walked in the door, he said, "Man, you'll love this." I assumed he meant that he had cleaned the floor especially well or something, but then I walked in and found that he had tied all the employees together and hung Glen upside down from a ceiling fan.
It only took me a moment to realize that Bob had done this and had evil designs on Glen's life. I acted as though I sympathized with him and told him about my unjust firing, and he said that he would give me the honor of the first shot. Hoping to look realistically humble, I said, "Oh, I couldn't." Sadly, he thought that I was being ungrateful and promptly shot me in the thigh. As I writed on the floor, he began enumerating his grievances against Glen, often repeating his charge that Glen had been paying him minimum wage for the last eight years. As he listed off his charges, I gathered my strength and jumped at him in an attempt to keep him from following through on his nefarious designs. Sadly, before I managed to tackle him, he shot me in the head. My dying thoughts were, "Man, first I total my car for this job, and now this."
Glen had been baptized Catholic, and I soon ran into him in purgatory. "Now that we're dead," I asked, "I have to ask, why did you really fire me? I know that calling in sick isn't grounds for termination."
"Well," said Glen, "you're right about it not being about calling in sick. I was just waiting for you to do something wrong so that I could fire you, because I always thought you were a total moron."
I thanked him for his honesty and started to walk away, but he called me back.
"Oh, and that thing with trying to tackle Bob and save my life," he said. "You really screwed that up. If he wouldn't have killed you, I definitely would have fired you for that."
I had nothing to say. He turned and left me to rolling out the 5,035,227 extra large pizzas I had remaining.