Playing With / Vetinari Job Security

Basic Trope: A character vacates their job, and nobody else can do it properly.

• Straight: Bob is vice president in charge of accounting at Trope Co. When he retires, newcomer Alice is assigned his job; she makes serious mistakes that cost the company millions.
• Exaggerated: Bob is the leader of a large country; it collapses upon his death.
• Downplayed:
  • The accounting department goes into chaos for a week, but the problems are fixed once Alice figures a few things out.
  • Alice finds that while Bob ran the department well singlehandedly the company could only do so reliably with a team of three, meaning that while he was considered overpaid for one person he proved to be a very good bargain.
• Justified:
  • Bob is very good at his job, and it is harder than the new VP was expecting.
  • Bob has been doing his job for so long that no one else has even close to the amount of experience that he does.
  • Bob uses a custom-made program, method, or computer to do his accounting with high speed and efficiency. For whatever reason, he's the only person who can use it, though.
• Inverted:
  • Bob was incompetent. When Alice takes over, she fixes most of the problems he created or exacerbated, helping the company greatly.
  • Bob is told that Alice is skilled enough to do his job, so he can be replaced should he mess up.
  • Bob is too necessary where he is, so he is denied promotion and instead it is given to Alice (who may or may not be so incompetent that there is a chance giving her more power is going to put her out of Bob's hair/make his life more of a living hell, Depending on the Writer).
• Subverted:
  • Alice is shown to be relatively incompetent, and when she takes over everyone expects disaster, but it turns out the position is mainly a figurehead one, and even Alice can't cause much damage from it.
  • Alice's job is incredibly important, but many of her colleagues don't know, don't care, or both, leading to them denigrating her.
  • Alice takes steps to prevent her being as indispensable as Bob, knowing it leads to The Perils of Being the Best.
• Double Subverted:
  • Alice turns VP of accounting into a more active position.
  • Alice takes the others' mockery to heart and falters at her job.
  • The changes Alice had to bring to the whole company to improve it to become less indispensable makes people place her in a pedestal anyway and thus, while they have the competency to assume her place if she needs to be replaced, what they lack is the courage.
• Parodied: Bob goes on vacation for a week, during which time several unrelated problems appear. As soon as he returns, they instantly disappear.
• Zig-Zagged: (Continued from Double Subverted) It turns out that Alice wasn't as dumb as she seemed, and she does a good job in her new role. Then she quits, and when Charlie takes over from her, he causes a disaster.
• Averted: The transition of power goes smoothly and the company works as well (or poorly, as the case may be) with Alice overseeing its accounting as it did with Bob doing that.
• Enforced: This shows that Bob was good at his job, and Alice has his very big shoes to fill.
• Lampshaded: "Gee, we sure have had a lot of problems since Bob left."
• Invoked: Bob set this up so that the company would suffer if he left so that he couldn't be fired.
• Exploited: Charlie buys up lots of the company's stock after it plummets and then sells it after the company recovers.
• Defied:
  • Bob helps Alice learn how to do the job so that she doesn't cause a disaster.
  • Even if Bob makes everything run so smoothly it looks like if he so much as takes an extended bathroom break everything will come crashing down, he still gets fired/killed/etc. It may be that whoever does so is too full of Unstoppable Rage (or is Ax-Crazy or actively desires anarchy) to care. It may be an attempt to deliver a message that nobody is irreplaceable (either to Bob or to everybody else). It may be that Bob has committed so many violations that the Powers That Be have decided it's better just to take their chances with the inevitable 'reconstruction' period.
  • Bob is fired and his work outsourced as soon as Cathy the Reasonable Authority Figure gets fed up with his antics. If he lasts any longer after his warning, it's because she decided to secure a good deal for it before turning Bob redundant.
  • Cathy absolutely refuses to give Bob any position of power that he could exploit to become indispensable/entrench himself within the company. If she actually promotes him, it's very much a case of being Kicked Upstairs.
• Discussed: "You know how there's always this one jerk in every job that tries to make himself look indispensable so nobody can fire him no matter what, otherwise everything comes to a screeching halt? Well, Bob's that guy."
• Conversed:
  • "Bob is too important to ditch. That's kind of the problem. He's the only guy who can make things work 'round here. If we fired him, if he got sick, if he went on strike—hell, if he takes too much time to get here in the morning? Whole damn place would fall apart, just like that!"
  • "Is it better to be feared or loved? Neither. It's best to be indispensable."
• Implied: Bob is said at first to be the most composed and competent person on the board, then the person who really makes the company run.
• Deconstructed:
  • Bob hates his job. Unfortunately, no one else can do it. When Alice fails at this, Bob is forced back into the role.
  • Everyone realizes that when Bob inevitably dies, things will become much worse.
  • Bob will never be fired because he's indispensable, but unfortunately this means he will never get any raises (at least in an official manner) or promotions (for fear of succumbing to The Peter Principle). Additionally, if he loses his job somehow, he will be unable to find similar work because other business owners won't want him usurping their authority.
  • Bob can't be replaced, but this also means that if he ever so much as catches a 24-hour cold, the whole business is doomed. And nobody can do anything about that.
  • Being impossible to fire no matter what is the kind of power that challenges people's character and morality very greatly. Because of this, Bob becomes a Jerkass very quickly. Consequently, Bob will walk the road to becoming so hated that people will risk their complete ruin just to smack the sneer off his face sooner rather than later.
  • Bob might be irreplaceable within his company, but the company isn't irreplaceable within the economy. If it goes bankrupt, even despite him and his best efforts, he will be unemployed.
  • The steps Bob has taken to become indispensable are such that, in the event something bad just happens, everybody else just immediately assumes that it's one of Bob's schemes and tell him to cut it out even as Bob insists it's not his fault and he can't fix it.
• Reconstructed:
  • Bob learns to tolerate the job or can find a suitable replacement.
    • Alternatively, Bob takes Defied #1 further and manages Alice and a couple of other competent staff to run the jobs with him. Alice learns Bob's old jobs, while Bob learns new management skills which their office was starting to look for. Alice and her colleagues can now run the division very well without Bob, while Bob gets promoted to a higher position that just became vacant recently, which needs both his old trade and his newly acquired management skills.
  • Bob is given immortality; alternatively, the job dies with him or other people change it into something more manageable.
  • Bob lives modestly and doesn't demand raises.
  • Bob avoids getting sick through good hygiene, a healthy diet, and extensive exercise. Even if he does get sick, he figures out how to work from home with equal effectiveness.
  • Understanding that with the impressive power that he wields within his company Comes Great Responsibility, Bob practices being a Benevolent Boss. Nobody ever considers firing him because nobody ever wants him to leave.
  • Another company's vice president for accounting is planning to retire and that company decides to hire Bob.
  • Bob is Crazy-Prepared and provides detailed evidence that he had nothing to do with the bizarre events that made everyone else think he was trying to shore up his status (even) further.
• Played for Laughs: Everyone hates Bob due to his antics, but they always need him (in a societal version of Bunny-Ears Lawyer). Whenever they try to get rid of him, Hilarity Ensues.
• Played for Drama:
  • Alice gets no training before being given a job far above her skill level. Inevitably, she fails, whereupon everyone in the company blames her completely.
  • A combination of All of the Other Reindeer and Bob living paycheck to paycheck means that his job security is the only thing keeping a roof over his head. He must go out of his way to make sure he's irreplaceable lest he end up on the street in a hurry.
• Played for Horror:
  • Bob is a horrifyingly psychotic kingpin who terrorizes the town constantly, but the local underworld behaves like a well-trained (and whipped) dog to all his commands. His chief rival, Alice, is either more incompetent or more indiscriminate in her violence, possibly both. You Do Not Want To Know what will happen if he leaves; the casualty projections for the opening Mob War alone make most people decide to leave Bob alone and protect him from the other half who want him gone no matter what, a decision that they can only bear with a lot of liquid courage.
  • Bob is a Benevolent Dictator. He is not only loved enough by his people that Hiro will not find any allies within his realm, they will turn him over to Bob and Bob will demonstrate to Hiro why that trope contains the word "dictator", which won't end well. Furthermore, one of the reasons why Bob's subjects love him is because compared to all his rivals, he is definitely the least evil.

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