Gather round, everyone I have a tale to tell you. Everyone comfy? Good. Here we go! In November I started a new job. Anyone who has met me, knows I have a tendency to be incredibly anxious about things like grocery shopping or getting dressed in the morning (matching is hard and pants are uncomfortable) so imagine the emotional turmoil of meeting a ton of new people and having to learn something brand new. I was pretty stressed out about the whole thing. I won’t confirm or deny this, but I may or may not have convinced myself that I was about to get fired at any moment at least 50 times a day for the first three months I was there. On one such occasion, I decided to go for a stroll outside on my afternoon break. Sometimes just getting up and leaving the room helped me keep my anxiety in check. It was a beautiful day outside so I felt very pleased with my decision to get some fresh air. Feeling good and much less like I was on the verge of destroying my professional career, I headed back inside to finish out my day.
You can’t get into the parking lot or the building I work in without swiping your badge. It’s a financial institution so they’re pretty serious about security. The women who work at the front security desk are lovely and sweet and I had come to be pretty friendly with them since starting. I walked by and swiped my badge and was about to continue upstairs when one of them called me back. My badge didn’t swipe, so she needed me to do it again. No problem! Technology is the worst, amiright? I will happily swipe my badge again! All smiles, I whipped out my ID and ran it across the scanner again. The normally very jovial security admin got a weird look on her face. “I’m sorry, hon. Something must be going on. Let me just call the back security office,” she said with a strained smile. I laughed and told her it was no problem. I stood there for a few minutes with the other woman working the front desk and made a joke about how I was probably getting fired. Back security didn’t answer their phone, so the woman who originally stopped me was just going to walk back there real quick and talk to someone in person.

This is right about the time I started to get nervous. I played it cool and chatted with the other woman behind the desk. I pulled out my phone and texted a co-worker upstairs and asked him to let our bosses know I was stuck downstairs and I was probably going to be late coming back from my break. When the security guard (they are actually called First Impression Ambassadors on their name plaques which I always thought was half badass, half ridiculous) saw my R2D2 phone case, she asked me if I liked Star Wars. I am a human, who has eyes and feelings and appreciates Fine Cinema so I obviously told her yes. She pulled out a Star Wars lanyard and asked me if I wanted it. I jokingly asked if this was my parting gift because I was being fired today and she sort of nervously laughed and didn’t answer. This is the part where I definitely started to get borderline frantic. Even though I was freaking out on the inside, I obviously accepted her Star Wars related gift. I texted my co-worker again and told him I was starting to get really scared. He teased me and told me I was being silly. The other guard came back from her trip to back security (I’m still not sure she just didn’t go to the bathroom and she definitely came back with a coffee so I’m about 85% positive “back security” is like the stock room at the mall. People talk about it a lot but nothing is really in there and we all just use it as a way to make people think we’re doing work or trying to find something for them but really we’re just using this as a pleasantly surprising unscheduled break) and she told me it would just be another minute. I decided to take a seat because I was getting the feeling this was going to take even longer than I originally expected it to. This is the part where I became convinced I was definitely, absolutely, getting fired. As I made my way over to the seats, I noticed the women behind the desk eyeing me like I was a wild animal. They both got really tense and one of them even half stood up and they never took their eyes off of me. Uh oh. People only look at you that way when they think you’re about to a) commit a crime, b) attack them, or c) lose your mind and flip out because you’re getting fired in the lobby and you didn’t see it coming. I’m not very physically intimidating and they had already given me a sweet lanyard (what else could I possibly want to steal) so we were all probably thinking the same thing. I was definitely a potential option c.

Right after I sat down, I got a text from my co-worker upstairs. It was not good news. “I think they called A about you. I heard him say your name,” he texted. “Are you serious?!?!?!?!?!” was my reply (but probably with the F word in there somewhere). “Yea, I definitely heard him ask N & S if something was going on with you just now,” he sent back. A is our boss’s boss so if security was calling him about me, this was not good. Like, really, really not good. Shit. “I am totally getting fired! This is really happening!” I texted, trying to decide if throwing up in the lobby would get me a pity re-hire or just kicked out faster. I wondered if tears were a better idea. If I sobbed hard enough and puked, would they just throw their hands up in frustration and give me my job back? Was I above begging? I probably wasn’t. What’s the best way to go about begging? Should I just get down on my knees now and wring my hands so I was in the proper position when A came down to deliver the bad news to me? My thoughts were interrupted by a very sweet, kind looking woman. “Are you Jennifer? Why don’t you come with me? We’ll get everything figured out, okay?”

This is the part where I absolutely started to lose it. Completely crazy thoughts started running through my mind. If I ran, I could make it through the doors and back up to my desk and maybe no one would notice. I could sit down and quietly just continue doing my job and maybe everyone would just be like, “Yea, we were going to fire her, but it looks like she made it back to her desk and she’s already logged in and it looks like she’s working on something already so we should just let her stay. Firing someone is such a hassle and she’s being very quiet and polite, ugh we’re so busy, let’s just unfire her.” Then all of us, especially me could pretend like this never happened. Turns out the nice lady who was leading me toward the doors was from HR. She was certain we would figure out what was going on. Just as I was about to enact my carefully thought out sob/vomit plan, A showed up to save the day. He loudly and confidently announced that I was not fired. For approximately 10 seconds I considered kissing him on the mouth, I was so happy. I quickly remembered the goal here was to not get fired so I decided to just go with a grateful smile instead. The security guard actually asked this man if he was sure. She looked at him, pegged him as a liar, then said she wasn’t sure if she was allowed to let me back upstairs. A and I looked at each other for the first time then and I’m pretty sure we were thinking the same thing which can be summed up as “this absolutely cannot be happening right now and also, I still feel like I’m going to puke a little.” Okay, maybe we weren’t thinking the exact same thing, but I’m confident it was similar. He finally managed to convince the women at the desk that he was kind of a big deal and they should just listen to him and let him bring me back upstairs.

Cut to the most awkward elevator ride of my life. This was more awkward than the time I got stuck in an elevator with a pregnant woman who kept asking me if it was going to really upset me if she peed in her pants if we were stuck for much longer. Like I had gone through this before and had a definitive, well thought out opinion on pregnant women peeing in stuck elevators. I don’t know, lady. I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. I wouldn’t feel right declaring I’m pro-elevator pants peeing because this has never happened to me before and I just really want to focus on how we’re getting out of here. Anyway, luckily A is a pretty funny guy and we had a nice and awkward laugh about how crazy it was that I just spent the past 15 minutes thinking I got fired in the most messed up, surprise attack ever. He walked me back to my desk while everyone stared at us and wondered why I had to be escorted to my cubicle like a small child and I went about the rest of my day.

It turns out that I had lost my security badge a little over a week before this super fun incident and a helpful citizen had found it and turned it into the mysterious back security office. I had already gotten a new badge at this point and completely forgot about the one that had been lost. Security was going through the returned badges and shutting off their access to the building and in the process managed to mark me as a termed employee, not just term the access on that badge. The lovely HR lady explained this to me when she returned my ID to me a little later that day. Oh! Did I forget to mention that? They confiscated my badge and I had to be signed in as a guest by A to get back in the building. Yea, it was awesome.

So for the next couple of weeks, no one let me live this down. I’d say something and my boss would respond with “yea but you don’t work here anymore, so you don’t really have a say.” I got employee of the month the following month and we joked that it was because they felt bad about that time they fired me. It actually helped me get over my fear of being fired at any second. I now knew I had the whole cry/puke/run/sit quietly plan under my belt so I at least felt a little more prepared for my impending doom than I had before. One thing is for sure, I will never, ever, ever, lose my badge again. Ever. For the rest of my life.