I found the 8+ page email my dad wrote to his former bosses at Xerox after he was let go in the late nineties/early aughts, despite having a decorated career filled with awards and having survived numerous previous rounds of layoffs. I’m not sure if he ever sent it, or if it was something he wrote as a catharsis and printed out for his own use, but it perfectly encapsulated what I would later learn to realize to my great disappointment the kind of person he is.
A considerable portion of the letter was a recap of how he felt slighted by the way he was summoned to the meeting, on false pretenses. A great deal more of it was ranting about various coworkers and managers; he was at once loved by everyone and the scapegoat for everyone else’s mistakes. Nothing was his fault. He’d been aggrieved, treated unfairly, chewed up and spit out after dedicating 20 years to a company he helped build, yadda yadda yadda.
Two sentences buried roughly in the middle of the diatribe quickly noted the actual reason he was fired: he got busted using his workstation to access porn.
He bounced around a couple jobs after that before deciding, at 52, that he’s worked enough in his life and is done. My mother has had to support him and three children since. I moved to the other end of the country, my brother moved to the other side of it, and my other brother left the continent entirely. We get pity party texts from time to time about how no one loves him and we’re hurting our mom. I routinely get passive-aggressive twelve-bubble text rants about how terrible I am for having taken on student loan debt that he told me he would take care of and how it’s upsetting to my mom (sensing a pattern?) that her paycheck is being used to pay about 30% of the loans while I take care of the rest—a rather bastardized way to interpret “don’t worry about it” in my opinion—because he has chosen to stop working or looking for work.
Meanwhile he bought a new kitchen, two new bathrooms, three new cars, and a set of new windows all around the house. He’s sure got his money’s worth out of that work wank.