LOL! The last time I allowed myself to become fired, I was escorted out by security, with the promise of having the contents of my desk sent to me later.
LOL! The last time I allowed myself to become fired, I was escorted out by security, with the promise of having the contents of my desk sent to me later.If that promise was kept, you may have been one of the lucky ones. (On those occasions when I've been canned, I was always allowed at least to retrieve my personal possessions from my desk before leaving.)
I remember reading the memoir of Noah Dietrich, the longtime number one aide to Howard Hughes, in which Dietrich said he had to get a court order to get his personal possessions out of his old office after he walked out on Hughes in 1957. (The memoir was the first known from-the-inside look at the Hughes empire.) Dietrich had resigned over a capital gains dispute---Hughes had long promised him a new capital-gains deal on some of his income; the resignation occurred away from Dietrich's office and at Hughes's then-home.
"Lock up his office!" Dietrich recalled the long-familiar Hughes order whenever top Hughes executives left, a practise the young Hughes began with the memory of how a one-time Hughes Tool engineer named Reed walked out of the tool company with some critical blueprints by Hughes's father (whose multiple revolving-edge drilling bit invention revolutionised the oil industry and---thanks to leasing more than selling the bits---provided the fortune Hughes, Jr. used as his own foundation) from which Reed developed a rival drilling bit company.
Dietrich wasn't even close to the type who'd walk out with company secrets to exploit (it took him almost twelve years to begin writing his memoir*), but he was so indispensable to Hughes that Hughes just wouldn't let him go without a fight. Hence the court order.
(* -- Dietrich's memoir, by the way, is believed to be the inadvertent source for the infamous Clifford Irving hoax: an early draft of the Dietrich book, for which Dietrich had had the help of writer James Phelan, is thought to have gotten into Irving's hands one or another way, giving Irving enough information to help convince his own publisher that he had the real Hughes autobiography on his hands and in his typewriter . . . at first. It must have rankled Dietrich if it was true, since Dietrich said his first reason for writing his memoir was to leave his children and grandchildren a record of the role he played in the Hughes story.)