The printout hit my desk with a thud, a single piece of paper with words from someone I don’t know that blew up my world.
“What’s this?”
“Consider it my resignation letter.”
Jim had worked for me for 15 years, most of that time serving as my right-hand man as we took the company public and made a little product that the latest surveys showed was used by 86 percent of Americans. That meant we had both lots of money and a lot more eyeballs on our personal lives.
I’m not perfect. Jim certainly was never perfect. Unfortunately for him, his imperfections were caught on video, most importantly the night he stumbled into a Chili’s and spent a drunken three hours getting progressively handsy with a collection of female bartenders. I suspended him after that one and implored him to get whatever form of help would be needed to get him to have some basic respect for other people.
He came back vowing things were different and that I had nothing to worry about. I needed his work so I believed him.
“Log off and die bitch.”
That was the first line that got him. He had posted what he saw as a banal tweet about enjoying nice views on a warm day, but which anyone who knew his past would assume was a pervy prelude to an afternoon of ogling young women in the park outside our office.
I asked him many times to consider keeping a lower public profile, simple things like not being super active on social media, and for the love of everything to not respond to comments. Jim rarely listened to me and saw those pleadings as “babysitting a grown man.”
“I would but it’s too beautiful a day to lay down and not move,” he wrote back to a woman whose Twitter account identified herself only as Amanda. If that weren’t bad enough, he closed with a winky-face emoji.
His original tweet drew a dozen scathing comments. This one got 100 in the first minute.
“You’re old. You’re stupid. You’re gross. Nobody likes you. You simply do.not.get.it.” Amanda replied.
Jim restrained himself for exactly 20 seconds before firing back.
“I’m young at heart. You are. You are. You do. I get it whenever I want baby girl,” he said.
Shortly after he hit the send button my phone started blowing up. Text after text after text all asking essentially, “OMG HAVE YOU SEEN IT?”
I hadn’t yet. Our company wasn’t big enough to merit some kind of social media division or PR team that monitored executive communications 24/7. By the time I found my way to Jim’s timeline, Amanda had responded again.
“I’m not sure how big of a grave you need, but please please please keep digging. This is making my day,” she wrote. Affixed to the end was a link to an online petition calling on me to fire Jim for “GROSS misconduct.”
I could barely move the mouse to click on the link, trying to take in what was happening and how I would need to respond before it got worse. Once there, I refreshed the page every few seconds, watching the number of signatures and shares skyrocket. A thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand signatures, all in less than half an hour.
I was picking up my phone to summon Jim to my office when he walked in. He seemed somehow proud of what he had accomplished, and mentioned his “resignation” in a tone so mocking it was clear he had no understanding of his own words.
“You think this is okay?” I asked him.
“If I’m not hitting that by midnight I’ve lost a step, my friend,” Jim said with a boys will be boys smile.
He wanted a verbal high-five. I had only one option.
“Good news, Jim. You may hereby post whatever you want, whenever you want.”
“About time, boss. I—“
“You’re done here. Be out in five minutes.”
It took him twenty. I watched from my fifth-floor window as two building security guards escorted him out to his pickup. As he finally drove away with screeching tires, I turned back to my computer and pulled up Twitter.
“To too many, far too late, it’s done. I’m so very sorry.”
I worked Jim’s printout into the best paper airplane I could engineer and aimed it at the trashcan across the room. It flew in a smooth, beautiful arc before coming crashing down into the side of the can, leaving its nose smashed in.