When a Layoff Feels Like a Toxic Divorce

“Our investors don’t like Mexicans,” said my intoxicated ex-boss on a humid Tuesday evening. 

We were getting dinner on Sixth Street in Austin, Texas after a long day of doing a “worth-with” where he started pounding drinks at our first account, and continued to do so throughout the day.

I was stunned. A big part of my naivety died that day when he proceeded to tell me that the Mexicans of the company would be the first round of layoffs of this fictional Texas whiskey company if the time ever came. His eyes were glazed over, and he was operating in a very sped-up manner, so I highly doubt he remembers this conversation taking place. I, on the other hand, was stone cold sober. He had mocked me for being “no fun” to every buyer we met with that day because I exercised my own autonomy to not consume alcohol.

We will call him “Gnat” for the purposes of protecting the guilty. I originally thought about calling him Pat, but then I remembered that he resembles more of a gnat: annoying and useless.

I hated when Gnat came to town; he made my fucking skin crawl. He never respected me. He never saw or heard me as the hard-working Latinx individual that I know I am in my core. The sad thing is that Gnat truly believes he is a good, fun and interesting person. But Gnat is a big part of the problem.

I earned an incentive trip to a beach in Mexico with the team and ordered Lobster, which is my favorite, during our company’s celebration dinner. A very sunburned and sloppy Gnat was so triggered that a young Latinx woman had the fucking audacity to order the most expensive thing on the menu during an incentive trip he stopped mid-conversation and very loudly announced, “Wow! You ordered the lobster!?”. My white male counterpart sitting across from me ordered the same thing. Both of us picked up on why I was the only one that got called out my Gnat.

So why the fuck did I stay until they ultimately laid me and the entire heart of the sales team off? The answer is not entirely that simple, but I’ve deduced it to this:

I thought that maintaining a good career where I made decent money would keep me out of the grasps of an abusive man. On the contrary, it actually threw me into the hands of many abusive men. Men that have constantly fetishized me in the workplace but have never respected, seen, or heard me.

Let’s rewind to when I first started my job with the company a year ago.

A man that we will call “Pans” reached out to me via LinkedIn and opened-up the conversation about wanting me on the team. I was incredibly complimented at the time, as I had worked with Pans back in 2012 at the beginning of my career. I really respected him.

But Pans was probably the most toxic of them all.

My rose colored-glasses of my 20’s kept me from noticing all the red flags. He majorly low balled me with the initial salary offer, meaning he did not respect my true value in the industry from the get-go. How dehumanizing is that? I, a highly qualified and charismatic Latinx individual, had to haggle a white man multiple times to pay me a decent wage for a company that I worked way more than 40 hours a week for.

Fast-forward to the week of the layoff. I called Gnat and asked him if my job was safe during the Covid-19 state-of-affairs, expressing I would like some transparency because I do not have much of a safety net. Gnat assured me the company was “financially healthy” and I had no reason to worry. Then he proceeded to ask me if I was willing to start using my own credit card for company expenses to be reimbursed instead of using my company-provided one. He tried to make his case by selling me on acquiring airline miles.

I’m not an idiot. Given the state of the economy I respectfully declined.

This is an important piece of information, because the fictional whiskey company still owes a collective $10k in reimbursement expenses to the rest of the sales force that they laid off. Not to mention they also owe $45k to a promo company they used throughout the fiscal year.

I want to make something very clear: I am not upset about the layoff. Layoffs are inevitable during recessions and pandemics. I am upset with the way it was handled, and I am upset with myself for staying with the company despite the blatant daily disrespect.

The company laid us off on a fucking Saturday after having us work the entire previous week.

They did this a week after they gave us a $50k budget to feed “unemployed service industry workers”. Yet, they made us part of the unemployed and fighting for government assistance population mere days after having our labor used as their final “good publicity stunt”. They have continued to do feel-good publicity events where they pay for meals of “those in needs” while their entire sales team was left up the river without a paddle. It doesn’t get much more dehumanizing than that.

Except it does.

The laid-off sales force was also tricked into providing our entire contact list Friday at 5pm the day before our Saturday layoff. We were given a list of accounts and a script they wanted us to use, then required to fill out a spreadsheet to “log our productivity” of the calls and list the buyer’s names and numbers. I was too naïve to see this as a red flag and handed over my book of business. Several others in the company handed off their contact lists as well.

Pans called me the Monday after the layoff to ask if I was “mad at” the fictional whiskey company where he still has his fictional job.

To which I responded, “I don’t know. I’m just worried about putting food on my table and keeping the condo I bought by myself a couple months ago.”

His response:

“Wow bad timing to buy a condo, huh?”

Awkward silence…

“Well…keep on keepin’ on,” were his final words to me.

And that is precisely what I have done. I have kept on misbehaving. I have kept on speaking my mind. I have kept on being the threat that this company didn’t even know they had.

Turns out: I’m the real Devil.

For the record this is all fiction, and probably shouldn’t make any individuals or companies feel guilty, correct? I was originally afraid of getting sued for sharing this, despite it being fictional, but what can this fictitious company come after anyway?