Fired for Making a Game
12th March 2014
They hadn’t actually played the game. The union reps, the line managers, the HR goons. It didn’t matter. They sat him down and fired him anyway, for creating a game that none of them bothered to play.
For David S. Gallant, this is the single most egregious factor in his unhappy journey from the land of employment and stability to the rough country of uncertainty. In retrospect, a month after the event, he understands that writing a game about his crappy job as a call center “meat popsicle” might not have made him friends in high places at the Canadian Revenue Agency. He knows now that talking incautiously to the Toronto Star about why he made I Get This Call Every Day was an act of naiveté.
Looking back, he can regard the grinding political machine that generated an angry comment from the Canadian Minister of National Revenue, no less, and he can appreciate the inevitability of his own termination.
He knows that if he’d instead posted a song or a poem or a comedy routine on YouTube, the bosses would have watched that, and might have understood what he was trying to say to them. If he’d created something that told the same story through a more traditional form than a game, he’d probably still be in a job.
But he still wishes they’d at least taken the time to play his game.