Tag: Fired

  • Short Story Review: “Process of Elimination” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

    (The short story “Process of Elimination” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh appeared in the May 4th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Jake Hollings

    There was a moment when I was reading Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s “Process of Elimination” that I had to ask myself if it was possible to have a reliable narrator in a story who is completely unreliable because of the situation they find themselves in? On one hand, that doesn’t feel so much like a question, but more like an unsolvable literary riddle. But on the other hand, having this conundrum of a narrator kept me on my toes reading this story, happily figuring out which situations were and were not misinterpretations.

    The story follows a guy who unfortunately has the same first name of one of the Boston Marathon bombers, and that terrorist attack plays in the background of the piece. This guy is a recent hire at coffee shop which is located on a university campus in a New England, two states away from Boston. As the story begins, our narrator is informed that he is about the be fired from this job. At first he assumes this termination is due to a missing tip jar, but it is also implied that his name might be part of the reason.

    What I enjoyed about the protagonist is how normally flawed he is as a person. Maybe a little too eager to please, a little lazy, and perhaps prone to “get out over his skis” when it comes to events, but not a bad guy. He does his best in the situation he finds himself in, a minor crisis of employment and unemployment, trying to figure out what events, statements, actions are connected, and what actions he should take next. And when he receives a resolution that he desired months later; he is faced with the fact that he truly didn’t understand all the factors coming into play with his termination. There is a nice O. Henry touch of irony there with his guilt, and a wonderful last line to the story, that gave me a laugh as the narrator had failed up.

    “Process of Elimination” is another solid story from Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in The New Yorker, and I do commend his skill of working in several different tangents to this piece, to build a layered theme, tone, and setting. This wasn’t a “big” dramatic story, and there is a nice mix of humor in this piece as well, but it touches on the dramas and crises that make up our day to day lives which unfold while larger events develop around us; perhaps even unintentionally influencing our actions? Seems like a rather timely story, if you ask me.

  • Where Did That Come From? Aliens?

    I got a little tiny cut on the knuckle of my left ring finger, right above my wedding ring. It is a tiny little cut, barely there, but there enough to let me know that there is a tiny little cut on that finger. The perplexing part of this injury is that I have no idea how I received it. I just know that when I was walking home from parking the car this morning, I felt it on my hand.

    I didn’t come in contact with anything sharp as I completed the task of moving the car. Yet I know that I didn’t have it when I left the apartment, or at least I know that I wasn’t being annoyed by a tiny cut when I left home.

    This isn’t the first time of late that I have discovered some sort of injury on my body that I have no idea where it came from. Most of the time, I chock it up to playing around with the kid. I had a small bruise on my arm once that was a total mystery. A little scrap on my knee I discovered over the winter – when I had been wearing pants every day.

    Am I getting to the age when I forget things, or becoming so numb that I just don’t notice when something hits me?

    Even though this situation is nothing like the example I am about to give, but what this reminds me of is people being abducted by aliens, and the weird cut and bumps they discover after their encounters. Maybe that’s what’s happening to me?

    Or, what if I am being abducted by aliens, and I’m losing time in all, but what if the aliens are really clumsy with people? Like they have trouble keeping humans walking in a straight line, and the people walk into doors or walls? Or the aliens drop instruments on people. Not all the time, but accidents are known to happen, right?

    And then, what if these aliens got written warnings and bad performance reviews, and they lost their jobs abducting and probing people because of their sloppy work ethic?

    Then there is some alien sitting in a bar back on his home planet, getting drunk and bitching to his friend how his boss was a total dick, and he was set up to fail because his boss never offered any help or guidance, even when he asked for it. Then that alien goes on to tell his friend that his boss is totally screwed now because he was the one that kept the whole abducting and probing operation working, and it’s going to take them months to get everything back on track because that alien was the one who knew how everything worked.

    But then the alien’s friend tells him that the abducting/probing job wasn’t that great of a job anyway. They order another round, and talk about starting their own abducting/probing company if only they could get the money together.

    Or maybe I cut my finger on a sharp key on my key chain when I reached into my pocket.

    Maybe.