Tag Archives: sorry

I’m sorry but, you’re fired

I just don’t think we have any room for you here, not enough room, not with these numbers. What are we supposed to tell the shareholders? Nobody wants to see you go, well, nobody except for Maggie, but her objections … well, I probably shouldn’t have said that. Let’s just say that … I can assure you that Maggie had nothing to do with … with this. And between you and me, Maggie’s not going to make the next round of cuts. So don’t think of this as Maggie over you, I mean, nobody’s winning here. Sure, it might be hard to walk out of this office and not notice Maggie sitting there pretending not to smirk, but just think …

You know what? Forget I said anything about Maggie. And please don’t tell her what I just told you. Because if she confronts me … look, I’m going to be real with you here. I’m thinking that we’re going to fire Maggie. But I shouldn’t have told you that. I see now how that was a mistake. But I can’t take it back, and I’m realizing now how you don’t have anything to lose, because we’re already letting you go, and so I’m sure getting in Maggie’s face and telling her what I just accidentally told you, I’d bet that would bring some measure of satisfaction. I can see her just sitting there, not looking up at you, but smirking, smiling as you pack up everything from your desk into those boxes.

I don’t know why they make us give you these boxes. I mean, do you really have many personal belongings here? At work? Sure, I guess I’ve got these photos, although, I’m not really attached to any of them. If I were in your position, I’d gladly leave everything here, “You get rid of them,” I’d tell whoever shoved a box in my face, telling me, I have to be out of here by the end of the day. Of course, if I were in your position, I wouldn’t be in my position right now, and so I guess they wouldn’t be my picture frames. Would they be yours? No, that doesn’t make any sense.

What I’m trying to say is, jeez, I really shouldn’t have brought up Maggie. Look, I’ll be straight with you here, OK, if you tell Maggie what I just told you, I’m going to have to deny it. All right, Maggie’s going to come storming in here, talk about lack of professionalism, because again, I really shouldn’t have said anything. Do you know that you’re one of my first firings? Not the first. But definitely the second. The first one was Charles a while back, but he probably knew it was coming. And in his case, I think I said too little. I’m not sure I got across the whole let go aspect of the termination. Is he still coming in? Regardless, that definitely went a lot smoother than this is going right now.

Basically, if you tell Maggie, I’ll deny it. And it won’t end there, OK, because I can’t deny it and then fire her next week. She’ll be like, “I knew it!” And I can’t take that, not from Maggie, jeez. And so I’ll have to keep her on, indefinitely, probably. And so do you want that? You want her to keep her job? Or do you want her to get fired?

Obviously we haven’t made any final decisions regarding Maggie, or any of the cuts really, I’m just thinking that, there’s no way she makes it past next week. Which, yeah, it’s just unfortunate, you know, the whole company is just resizing or rescaling, or restructuring, what do you call it? There’s a lot of rebranding. Like this is new for me, letting people go, that’s like a rebranding. Man, I hope this gets easier. For me, I mean, you seem to be taking it all in stride.

And who knows? I mean, it was a bad quarter, yeah, and it sucks that we kind of have to go quarter to quarter here, but what if the next quarter is good? What if it’s really good? We’re probably going to be looking at some un-restructuring, which, I think you’d have to talk to HR again, I don’t know if they’d make you go through the whole interview process. Did you interview with me? When you first started? I mean, so yeah, you probably wouldn’t get me again, not unless they re-rebrand me back to hiring. Right now it’s strictly firing.

Not firing, you know, let go. Man, thanks for being so cool about this. Like especially in regards to Maggie. I seriously can’t stress enough how much I shouldn’t have brought her into this, OK. And like I said, even though I’m pretty sure we’re going to let her go, she’s definitely staying if she confronts me with any of this. Hell, I’ll suggest she gets promoted. So yeah, just keep your chin up, all right. Do you need a box? Because I have all of these boxes if you need to … like if you want to carry anything out. Yeah, I don’t really get the boxes.

But just, you see her smiling, just don’t even smile back OK. Just have like an inside smile, the smile of satisfaction that you get from me telling you … I mean, I’m not telling you … but I’m telling you telling you, Maggie’s out. But only if you don’t even look her way. Because any sort of nonverbal communication, like even a knowing smirk, OK, and she stays. Cool? All right. Sorry to see you go. Best of luck out there. You’ll be fine.

Hey, we should grab drinks sometime, now that I’m not your boss anymore. Ha. All right. Can you send in Rich on your way back to the desk? You know what? I should probably get him myself. Don’t worry about Rich. All right. Great. Thanks.

Bill, I’m sorry

Dear Bill Simmons:

I’m sorry I wrote you out of my life last week. I want to take it back. I know how cheesy this all must sound, me, making a big, dramatic farewell speech to you and then undoing it a week later. Because I know, everybody keeps telling me I have to make decisions and stick to them. When I was writing out that goodbye, tears streaming down my face, snot running down my nose, when I was in between sobs I recognized that, regardless of how much it hurts, I have to close this chapter of my life. Once I do this, there’s no going back.

And I tried, Bill. I really tried to put you out of my head. But I kept clicking on the Grantland home page. I’d turn around at work and the TV above the bar would be showing a clip of you talking on ESPN. I couldn’t hear what you were talking about, because all of the TVs are muted, and I don’t get why restaurants bother to have TVs on, if they’re just going to show a bunch of guys silently yapping away, without even the benefit of subtitles to give you the option of reading what the conversation might be about.

Anyway, it was a rough week. It felt similar to when my grandfather died a few years back. That sting of emptiness, the palpable sense of loss. Only, with my grandfather, I started to feel better after a few days, coming to terms with the inevitability of death, getting a small taste of my own mortality. With you it was different. Each day that passed since I told you we were through, the level of pain intensified.

I started waking up in the middle of the night crippled with regret. I kept reading and rereading my last letter to you. Why would I do something so stupid? Who gives up on a one-way correspondence with the Sports Guy after only two months? Bill, I realize that I’ve made a huge mistake, and if you’re willing to look past my very momentary lapse in judgment, I’d like to pick up where we left off: me, writing you a letter each week, begging you for a job, and you, blissfully unaware of my existence, hopefully one day stumbling upon this treasure trove of writing, you’ll be so overcome by my persistence, my faith in a dream, you’ll blurt out at your desk, “Hire this man!”

And your secretary will walk in and ask you, “Mr. Simmons, did you just say something? I was down the hall pouring a cup of coffee when we all heard you say something pretty loudly.” And that’ll kind of jolt you back to reality. You’ll explain that you were talking about me, this web site, the letters. Do it Bill, hire me to write for Grantland.

I really am sorry about last week. I hope that you can forgive me. Again, your feelings of confusion, frustration, and eventual forgiveness might be a little disjointed, depending on when you discover all of this, and in what order you decide to read these letters, if you read any of them at all. I guess it’s a little arrogant of me to assume you’ll have time for all of them. Maybe you’ll skip last week’s mistake and you won’t know what I’m talking about. Or maybe you’ll jump right to this week’s apology, and I’ll only have served to point you in the direction of that mistake. If I could just keep my mouth shut and stop talking about it for a second, perhaps we could both move on, pretend like it never happened.

I wish I could just go back and delete it. Well, I guess I could. But then what if you look at the whole list of letters and notice a gap where last week’s should have been? You’ll either think that I’m a slacker, not committed to my craft, or worse, you’ll assume that I have something to hide, which I kind of do. I don’t know what to do. Maybe I should just write some generic sounding letter and put it where last week’s letter was.

OK, I think I might be over-thinking this. Bill, I’m sorry I abandoned you. It’ll never happen again. That’s a promise. I don’t care if I ever get a job at Grantland, I’ll still write to you every week, begging. Please, let me write for Grantland. Come on Bill, give me a job. I’ll write about anything you want. Anything.

I’m really, really, really, really sorry,

Rob G.

How many times do I have to apologize?

Of course I’m sorry about those pizzas. I just … look, I apologized already. It’s something that I’ve admitted to, yes, OK, I’m not making any more excuses, right? Right. So it’s like, what else can I do? Besides apologize? It’s not like I didn’t pay for the pizzas. I paid for them. And then I ate them. Were those pizzas meant for someone else? Of course. Obviously. This is all yesterday’s news, you know, at a certain point, I fail to see the benefit in constantly rehashing all of this negativity, my faults, the stuff I’ve already admitted to. I admitted to all of it! And I said sorry. So yes.

Yes. But I paid for them. So let’s get past everything, OK? Past the pizzas, past me going outside and intercepting the delivery guy, look, I’m not proud. I’m ashamed. But it’s thanks to my family, my core of strength, you know, my support system. I can tell these people, look, I’ve made mistakes, and they’re like, look, we get it, not we get the whole buying people’s delivery and then eating it outside of their house, but we get it, like you’re a human being, and you’re sorry.

My wife. She shouldn’t have had to see me like that, at my worst. Those nights I’d come home, she’d have like her own pizza that she had delivered, she’d be, “Honey! Look, I got us some pizza!” and how could I really push any more pizza inside my stomach? But I would. I’d take a slice, you know eat a few bites. I’d be like, “I don’t know what it is honey, I’m just … I’m just not that hungry.”

And when she found out. It crushed her. It crushed us. I crushed us. But she forgave me. You know why she forgave me? Beside I asked for forgiveness. I said, honey, listen, I’m apologizing. I’ve made mistakes. But most importantly, I’ve learned from these mistakes. I’m still learning from the mistakes.

It’s a learning process. You don’t learn how to speak French overnight, right? You can’t stop doing drugs in one day. No, you’ve got to have supervision, you’ve got to make sure it’s not too drastic of a shock. So I’m learning, yes, but I’ve been completely open about my willingness to learn, my wanting to continue to still be at a learning place.

I can do this. But only with you by my side, my wife, my family, everybody. I need everybody behind me on this. And you know, there are so many people out there, so much negativity, do you know how hard it is for me? For my wife? And for me. We’ll be walking down the street and some guy comes up to me and he’s like, “You! It’s you! You know I ordered a dozen wings last night and there were only ten when I opened the box. You stealing wings?”

It’s just that, I can’t … I’m not … who’s to say who’s stealing what? I’m trying. I’m trying to figure out who’s wings I might have taken. I don’t necessarily think they were that guy’s wings, but would that have been right of me to say so right there? To that guy?

I always tip the delivery guys, mind you, you know if they have to come back to your place to deliver a second pizza, don’t get bent out of shape. I mean, yes, you should still tip him again for the second trip, but don’t feel bad about the first trip. Certainly don’t get angry with him. He could have buzzed, yeah, but that’s not his fault, he’s not checking IDs, he gets money, he leaves.

And think about, you know, this has been out there for a while, and so the delivery guys are bound to start recognizing me. And then it’s like, you know a month from now, nobody’s going to give me anything, regardless of how much money I’m forking over. Those boxes I left outside? Yes, again, I’m sorry, but I just thought that since cardboard recyclables were a Tuesday thing on my block that … yes, I get that now, different blocks, different days, different routes. I’m sorry about the mess, about those raccoons that tore the boxes up, I can’t imagine cleaning that up Wednesday morning would have been any fun. But it was just one day, so I’m sorry. So I’m saying sorry. Please, can we please get past this so I can stop saying sorry? Please?

Like I said, this is going to be something that just goes away by itself. I can’t see myself keeping up with this for much longer. It’s exhausting. And I mentioned the delivery guys recognizing my face, right? That’s got to happen sooner rather than later. I can’t keep this up forever. And sure, I suppose maybe I could give one guy like a hundred bucks, and he might still give me your food but …

Look, I’m sorry. I said sorry like a hundred times. This is really so not a big deal. We’ve got crooks out there, guns, drugs. Am I really the most pressing problem in this neighborhood? And no, it does not reflect my work in the community, at a city level. Come on, I’m still on the up and up. Remember how fired up we all got last year when I suggested we make all of those delivery guys wear those stupid vests? That was huge! Come on, just let me have this one thing, it’s not that bad of a thing, just stop paying attention to it. Still pay attention to me, but don’t pay attention to it. Because that’s it. It’s just that. Just the pizzas. And yes, maybe a couple of wings. And heroes. I’m sorry. That’s it. Thank you.