Today My Friend Got ‘Let Go’ From Her Job

Its half 10 in the morning. I am in the University library, surrounded by my laptop, calculator and pages of worksheets. My red pen in one hand and calculator in the other as I work through what seems like an infinite bank of questions. I hear my phone vibrate, but force myself to ignore it in an attempt to stay productive.

Half an hour later, my brain has had enough. I open my messages to see that my friend is asking me a question about work. She asks if its normal for us to attend a planning meeting for a client we are not working on. It makes no sense at all. Why would we be planning the job for a client we are not on the team for? I reply as such and smile. It’s nice having a close friend working at the same firm. I can’t imagine how I would have survived the initial months without having someone to stumble through the corporate world with. Even though we were both as lost as each other, it was nice trying to figure things out with someone I knew had my back.

I am scrolling through my other messages now, replying as fast as I can as I see the hand of the clock swiftly moving. And as I am about to close my phone, her message pops onto my top bar.

‘There’s no point now anyway lol. They just fired me.’

I freeze for a good minute.

The first thing I do is scroll down my notification panel to check the date. It’s May 23rd. No where near April fools day. Why would she be making such a ghastly joke? I really couldn't understand what I was meant to find funny about this situation.

I reply back asking to stop messing with me. She replies saying she’s not messing. They let her go because she failed an exam more than once.

—

So many thoughts were running through my head. So many.

None of it made sense.

If anyone deserved to stay on the job, it was my friend. I had worked side-by-side with her through my years at university. I knew her work ethic, the excellence she put in her work, her character. The company got lucky to have a gem like her even apply to them.

But they didn’t see that. They didn’t see her. They just saw numbers and stats. The exam passes were not achieved fast enough and so she wasn’t worth keeping.

In that moment I realised how easily dispensable we all were.

—

This isn’t a post about trying to get justice for my friend. We all signed these contracts knowing that if we failed an exam more than once, the probability of our contracts being terminated was high. I work as an auditor on a graduate program that requires us to sit x number of exams to qualify as a Chartered Accountant.

It’s more about the system that seems to continue to have us in its web even past our schooling years. The system that rewarded those that excelled at memorising and regurgitating facts in a 2 hour period. And punished those bubbling with curiosity and creativity.

It was a system that we were forced to sit through for 12 years of our life. Where everyday we were reminded that success was the grade you got. Where everyday, growth and character development were sidelined.

It reminds me of this talk by Sir Ken Robinson about how the education system resembles factory line production, adopted from the era of industrialisation.

And as I sit here with this post, I feel stupid to to have thought things would change for the better in the corporate world. It feels like we’ll never get away from this system.

If you reached till the end of this reflection, thank you my friend. I appreciate it!

I hope we get to meet each other in my next post too. Until then, if you have any thoughts about what you’ve just read let me know (in the comments or any other way). I’d love to start a conversation!

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Until next time,

Thasneema 🌻