Today we’ve got a story from the “capitalism does not care about you” file.

Even if you’re a well-paid cog in the machine, you’re still a cog, and the second you stop turning in the right direction, or even slow down, you’ll get replaced.

That’s not how things HAVE to be, but frequently, like in this story, it’s how they are.

Check it out.

AITA For Firing An Employee After His Parents Passed?

I’m the VP of Sales at a software company and one of our sales development reps parents passed away at the beginning of April, sadly they were involved in a car crash and both lost their lives.

Now the employee in question in very young 22 year old guy and has been with us for about 10 months now.

He’s a great employee and we were thinking about promotions in the next ~6 months for him.

His job is a high paying one for a new grad, about ~90k with commission and base so we expect a lot from this position.

So, a very young guy with what sounds like a pretty demanding sales job has experienced a huge tragedy.

…what comes next?

Because of the accident we let him take a 1 month paid leave of absence from work and he’s returned a few weeks ago and his performance is severely lacking.

He’s super unmotivated, not cold calling, not reaching to prospects for the last 2-3 weeks enough since he’s come back.

Our whole mgmt team has noticed this and we decided to let him go because we feel like he’d need months and months to be able to produce again and we can’t just wait that long.

As you can imagine, that didn’t go over well.

We called him into a meeting on Friday afternoon and gave him the bad news, he was very calm and rude about it.

Told us to go **** ourselves and got up and went to his desk grabbed his few things and left.

I thought this was very very unprofessional and extremely rude.

I told my boyfriend about all of this and he said myself and my mgmt team are a bunch of [jerks] and pricks with no hearts.

AITA?

Let’s get some analysis from the comments:

Just out of the blue like that?

Boy, you were in a rush.

Is this even for real?

Just awful.

He should have known better.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.