All bad job stories can be boiled down to someone at a company who was in charge over employees did not want someone at the company anymore.

No amount of emotions or rationalization or any other factor really changes this.

Employees are professionals who provide services while in employ. When your services are no longer wanted, they are no longer paid for and rendered.

You can say someone was a bad person or an asshole or whatever, you might be or they might be and probably will be right or both the employer or employee will both be right, or you will be dealing with a bad employer or employee. It happens. It’s life.

But I think the healthiest way to deal with these things is to remember you are providing a service for a fee. That fee might be a salary, it might be a retainer, it might be a flat rate, or a one time fee.

But you vend and perform services to those who pay for them.

Everything else, every other ceremony and nicety and construct, usually built by employers for employees, though sometimes albeit rarely both ways, is designed to impair this judgement and create a scenario where one party forgets this and their relationship is transformed into something else, usually subservient without a notion of autonomy.

It is why employers use “subordinate”—who are you truly subordinate to? You are not a slave. They are dependent on your labor and you on their patronage. It is mutual.

Or “terminate”—why is such ceremonious negative language used? To make you feel bad that employment has “ended.” Which is what it is an “end,” “termination” is needless.

Or “performance improvement plan,” what improvement needs to be dictated to a professional? A professional knows their limits and places where they can or cannot provide satisfactory service. When a professional fails to deliver, a client or customer simply does not buy. A professional knows they lack because a service or good was not purchased. The ulterior motive here is to punish. That’s why.

My advice—don’t do this. While rarely there might be something interesting to learn from bad employment stories, writing them as someone who is not of notoriety just tarnishes one’s image. The benefit is only, and only rarely, for the reader.