I would have SO loved to have done something this cheeky when I’ve been made redundant and I’d be forced to attend an “exit interview” with HR under threat of them not paying severance (which is illegal as hell but HR counts on the fact that most people are usually so shocked that they don’t think of ringing up the Wage and Hour Division and filing a complaint).
If you’ve never experienced one, thank your lucky stars and hope you never do.
It is such a joy sitting in a room with your former employer’s HR minion(s) and there’s this huge awkwardness permeating the entire proceeding.
Then they would try for some small talk on a personal level when we both know what’s happening which didn’t exactly help the awkwardness.
At some point, they would finally ask me some variation on “is there anything you can suggest for us to improve our operations?”
I honestly wasn’t sure which way was the right way to deal with that one.
Certainly it would have been more emotionally satisfying to ask them why in the hell should I believe my opinion would mean so more to HR now that I’m no longer an employee when it was often the case that HR could care less about my opinion when I was their employee!
Then there is a lot more awkwardness as I’m desperately racking my brain to try to think of a diplomatic way of telling them that not firing someone who was actually doing shed-loads of productive work in favour of retaining the heiney-smoochers who weren’t would have been a wonderful way to avoid being my newest odds-on favourite for headlining a certain notorious website.
Invariably, I’d come to the conclusion that my best strategy was to politely give them as little detail as possible. If I was lucky, the whole stupid meeting would last less than fifteen minutes…the exit and COBRA papers would be signed and finally I’d be let out on parole.
Frankly, had I known that bringing a clown along was an option…at least the clown would be entertaining! 😉