I Got Fired Over Zoom
The private Slack message arrived at 12:15 p.m., as I was toasting a year-old bagel, exhumed from my freezer: “Are you around?” It was the CEO, my direct manager. Normally she texts my phone when she wants to chat. Weird. “Yup!” I typed back. Where else would I be?
I spread the last of the cream cheese onto the bagel and took a bite. Passable. How quickly one adapts to new realities in a pandemic. During the past month, I’d cut my kid’s hair, sewed four masks by hand, paid my respects at a Zoom shiva, and handed over my ailing dog to a stranger to be euthanized alone. What other jerry-rigged mutations of the normal rituals of daily life awaited?
“Did you get the notice for the all hands?” my boss wrote.
No, I had not seen the email she’d sent less than an hour earlier. I’d been working on an op-ed for her, on the nature of communal grief and its effects on the brain.
[Read: On top of everything else, my dog died]
For the past two years, I’ve been the full-time head writer at a Silicon Valley health-tech start-up, working remotely from Brooklyn, with frequent cross-country trips—pre-pandemic, that is—to the mothership. Writing blog posts, op-eds, and complicated science-based content for our app takes uninterrupted focus, so I try to be disciplined about distractions, checking my inbox infrequently. Normally, anything urgent—the arrival of a cake in the office, a request for trivia topics for the weekly staff meetings—gets
