Basic Trope: A company fires its employees for whatever reason it feels.
- Straight: Bob, a longtime employee of Trope Co., gets fired for losing a three-legged race with his boss, Mr. Pointyhair.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob gets fired for looking at Mr. Pointyhair funny.
- Mr. Pointyhair tries to fire Bob, only to find out Bob doesn't work for him. So, he hires Bob for the sole purpose of immediately firing him.
- Mr. Pointyhair makes a point of telling Bob he will be fired for being less than perfect at his job.
- Bob has been fired from a long list of employers for all sorts of stupid reasons.
- Mr. Pointyhair adopts a new "Quantum Hiring Policy," where instead of hiring you and then firing you he just fires you first to save time.
- Downplayed:
- Though Bob remains employed by Trope Co., he's frequently dressed down by Mr. Pointyhair for numerous reasons, most of them incredibly petty.
- Bob remains employed by Trope Co., but he gets demoted (and promoted) so frequently he needs several boxes of business cards each with different job titles listed on them.
- Justified:
- Bob's repeated firings reflect his poor teamwork skills and disinterest in the same.
- Bob wasn't that great a worker and his job wasn't a vital function, so firing him doesn't hurt that company in the long run.
- Trope Co. was already planning to get rid of Bob for other reasons; they were just waiting for an excuse.
- The race was meant to test Bob's teamwork skills (which he failed miserably), thus proving that Mr. Pointyhair had been Obfuscating Stupidity all along.
- Mr. Pointyhair is a Jerkass with a Hair-Trigger Temper and an awful lot of power within the company.
- Inverted: Ultimate Job Security.
- Subverted: Bob is in Mr. Pointyhair's office, expecting a dressing-down and the phrase "You're fired." Instead, he only gets the dressing-down.
- Double Subverted: Then Mr. Pointyhair's superior comes in to fire Bob.
- Parodied:
- Bob gets a blank termination form when he's hired.
- Bob gets fired immediately after he's hired.
- The section of Bob's résumé detailing how many times Mr. Pointyhair has hired and fired him would take about a week to be read in full.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob is fired from his job for an inconsequential reason, then promptly rehired for an equally inconsequential reason. Then he's fired again, and rehired again, possibly for good reasons this time. The sequence continues until neither Bob nor Mr. Pointyhair is certain whether Bob still works here.
- Averted:
- Bob is not fired for anything inconsequential.
- Bob is fired, but the plot makes a point of showing his incompetence or misconduct first.
- Bob never had a job.
- Bob works for Trope Co. until his death.
- Enforced: "We need to show that the boss is zany! Let's have him fire an employee for no reason!"
- Lampshaded:
- "Let me guess: I'm fired."
- "You lost your job again, Bob? All right, back to the want ads …"
- Implied: Bob is a parody of the Standard '50s Father. He is presenting his résumé to a new company after the old one closed and he has many date ranges with one company.
- Invoked:
- Exploited:
- A complete Magnificent Bastard hires Bob and points out that with one more firing, he'd be practically unhirable.
- Bob gets ample proof that he was fired purely because of Mr. Pointyhair's whims and launches a wrongful termination lawsuit aiming to fleece at least four figures from the company and get Mr. Pointyhair fired.
- Defied:
- Mr. Pointyhair refuses to fire Bob after the unspecified team-building exercise.
- Trope Co. has policies specifically against this in both directions. Not only do bosses need documented and valid reasons to fire someone, their rules call for never rehiring someone fired for proper cause.
- Trope Co.'s human resources department has the policy of doing an extensive investigation regarding whether employees have become incompetent at their job assignments or committed serious misconduct, which they roll out every time Mr. Pointyhair arrives to order them to fire Bob. After the fifth time that Mr. Pointyhair almost got fired himself because they nearly discovered that he wanted to fire Bob because he didn't choose his daughter to win the local beauty pageant (because HR also has a zero-tolerance policy regarding abusing company resources), he backs down.
- Bob resigns from the company before he gets fired.
- Discussed: "Somehow, I doubt this job will last much longer than the others."
- Conversed: "Haven't any characters in these sitcoms heard of a wrongful termination lawsuit? I mean, sheesh!"
- Deconstructed:
- Firing Bob for something so inconsequential causes his coworkers to start to distrust Mr. Pointyhair, to the point where they all quit and the Trope Co. office is forced to shut down.
- The repeated firings take a heavy psychological toll on Bob, who is either Driven to Suicide or just driven crazy by his inability to hold regular employment.
- Trope Co. gets a big lawsuit regarding wrongful termination or even potential cruelty to their employees — after all, Bob was an acceptable employee within efficiency parameters (if not a perfect one) until he had to take that sick day, on the strict orders of the company doctor and the first one in years, to deal with a flu. Only the most inhumanly leonine of corporate contracts would consider that worth a reprimand, let alone instant dismissal.
- Bob gets wind that he's about to be fired for a meaningless reason. Feeling he has no incentive to do a good job, he decides to ride out his time at Trope Co. by neglecting his duties … or by sabotaging the company actively.
- Reconstructed:
- To Deconstructed 1:
- The repeated firings eventually teach Bob a valuable lesson, and he starts to build the crucial skills he needs to last at a job.
- The Trope Co. office, once reactivated, makes a point of being arranged so people who work there will be treated more fairly. This may include denying Mr. Pointyhair (and any of his supporters or successors) the right to fire people at the drop of a hat.
- To Deconstructed 2: Rather than hire Bob as a full-time employee, Trope Co. brings him on as a (frequent) consultant whenever they need his expertise. This way Bob can still work at the company while everybody understands he isn't expected to be there indefinitely.
- To Deconstructed 3:
- To Deconstructed 4: Mr. Pointyhair finds out about this and fires Bob for a good reason.
- To Deconstructed 1:
- Plotted a Good Waste: The work has a theme of fear for one's stable place in a firmament. Bob is the Audience Surrogate for the intended viewers: people who are Properly Paranoid about being potentially fired for no good reason, because it happens too often at their place of employment, the sector of which it's a part, or both.
- Played for Laughs: Bob's résumé is shown. The employment history alone would kill a whole forest if printed.
- Played for Drama: Bob's job performance and mental health suffer because he knows he can be fired for any reason, however trivial, and he's always worried when (not if) it will happen.
- Played for Horror: Mr. Pointyhair is a member of a cabal of people who love to Kill the Poor, and every time he fires someone he chooses them to be the next victim.
Go back to George Jetson Job Security or you're fired!
