Chris Rock joke reference, Data entry job failure, Dishwasher job didn't work out, Fired for sucker-punching, Fired from bar jobs, Fired from Kimmel show, Fired from one job, Hating a job experience, Producer involvement incident, Unpleasant at 15 years old, Writing partner didn't work, Writing partner's phone calls
Ask A Genius 986: Getting Fired From Jobs
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/29
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I’ve only ever been fired from one job. I was 15 years old, working at a bistro owned by a family friend in my hometown. I remember being quite unpleasant at the time. One day, as the dishwasher, the daughter of the owner said they didn’t think it would work out. It reminded me of that Chris Rock joke about hating a job so much that he would sit on the toilet to make more time pass. I did the same thing at that job.
Rick Rosner: I got fired from one job because I sucker-punched my writing partner. He acted like a jerk for weeks and wouldn’t do any work. This was before cell phones. He would spend up to two hours a day on the phone calling girls, trying to line up sex, smooth-talking them into sleeping with him or letting him touch them. I was getting more and more pissed off. As he was doing less and less work, I had to come in on the weekends and write things myself. We were supposed to be a writing team, but he wasn’t doing anything. After a while, I started getting so crazy that I would have to leave the office and drive to the nearest library to look at books for a little bit. Once I did that, I returned to find him sitting at my desk. He called me names for about a week to get him to do any work.
I told him to get out of my chair, and he just looked at me, so I punched him in the eye three times, knocking him over. It turned out that the producer had come by, seen that I wasn’t there, and told him to sit there and type stuff in my chair, so he hadn’t put himself there. Anyway, that was the end of us having that job. Yeah, I’ve had, I don’t know, over 50 jobs probably and have been fired from some of them. One was data entry in the very early days of computers. It was overnight. I had gone back to high school. I had come back to Boulder. I was depressed and worthless, and I would just bring in food and get crumbs on the keyboard. I was just no good at it.
I’ve been fired from a few. I worked in dozens of bars in Boulder, Albuquerque, and LA and was fired from some. A couple of times, it was for being too scrupulous about checking IDs. You want to protect the bar’s vibe. You don’t want to turn away too many cute girls. So maybe you let some fake IDs slide. If management had just come to me and said, “Look, this is the deal,” but no, they would have fired me instead.
What else? I eventually got fired from Kimmel. I was never told why, but I had been there for almost 12 years. I can speculate, but among other things, he wasn’t picking any of my stuff for the show anymore. So yeah, I’ve been fired sometimes. I also had a bunch of jobs that I just had to quit because they sucked.
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From → Ask A Genius, Chronology, Jacobsen's Bank
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