How to Engineer a Severance Package: A Reddit Story

The Art of the Non-Apology, or, How to Get Fired With Dignity

So there is this Reddit post[^1] from someone named Anny, who begins a story of spectacular workplace failure with a preamble about being a single mother, presumably to establish that she is, in fact, a human and not a large language model. This is a crucial bit of legal foreshadowing, because the top comment on her post is, delightfully, “This reads like AI.” The modern condition is that you can’t even confess to a career-ending faux pas without your audience suspecting you’re a fictional construct. A beautiful, tragic metaphor.

But let’s assume reality, because the incentives are more fun that way. Anny’s TIFU, which involves a cage and her boss, is presented with precisely zero upvotes and even fewer details. The specifics are a black box[^2], but the crowd-sourced response is a thing of perfect, predictable clarity. The commentariat’s unified field theory of problem-solving is a wondrously inefficient Rube Goldberg machine: 1. Go to HR. 2. Immediately lawyer up. 3. File a police report. 4. Check for cameras (the most important step, as it provides content for the eventual lawsuit). It’s a checklist for turning a single awkward event into a multi-year, multi-stakeholder administrative and legal saga.

And the real gem of systems analysis comes from user Uz_, who drops the foundational truth bomb of corporate life: “HR is to protect the company, not you nor your boss.” This is the core of the whole affair. You have two employees: one who might be a liability (the boss) and one who is definitely a liability (the person about to sue). HR’s incentive is not to find justice, but to find the path of least financial liability for the entity known as The Company. They are mechanics of risk mitigation, not therapists or judges.

So the optimal outcome for Anny, according to the wisdom of the crowd, is to be fired. Why? Because then she can “file unemployment with sexual harassment as the reason!” This is a fabulous bit of financial engineering. The goal is to transform a deeply unpleasant human interaction into a qualifying event for a government benefits program. The FU isn’t the thing in the cage; the FU is failing to monetize the thing in the cage properly[^3]. It’s about converting social capital into a paid vacation while your former boss’s career is fed into the woodchipper of a corporate investigation.

In the end, we are left with a masterpiece of incomplete information. We don’t know what happened. We don’t know if it was real. We only know the flawless, cold, and highly entertaining logic of the internet’s default settings when confronted with a human resources problem: sue everyone, trust no one, and for god’s sake, see if there’s a tape.

[^1]: Or, as I like to call it, the public ledger of poor life choices. [^2]: Perhaps literally. The post title is “TIFU the Cage WITH MY BOSS,” which is a spectacularly unhelpful data point. Was it a birdcage? A kennel? A metaphysical cage of their own making? The ambiguity is everything. [^3]: The real shareholder value was the lawsuits we made along the way.