I suppose I’ve fired about twenty to thirty people in my life. I hated every occasion except one of them (it’s easy to fire a gold-plated psycho) and used any and all methods to stop my hands from shaking, or – when that usually failed – just hid them from view.

There is no good time to fire someone. Two seconds after breaking the news, you are likely to learn from the victim that the mortgage company foreclosed on the house that morning, hubby died last night, or the new baby has leukaemia. This may sound cynical, but I promise you that every employee – however incompetent, dishonest or lazy – has a life including pain they did nothing to deserve.

But if senior management is about anything, it’s about compromise and dilemma. On the one hand, the establishment of a culture is central to everything; but on the other, you’re responsible for the salaries of upwards of 400 human beings. Sometimes you have to cruel to the few in order to save the many.

None of this, however, makes the job of dismissing people any easier, or alleviates the instinctive guilt felt by the moral employer. Hence the need to find some way to hide those shaking hands. Or – as I decided on one occasion – give them something to do. So it was that, some thirty years ago, I found myself in front of one of the most useless employees I’d ever encountered, fiddling with a rubber band. (Me not her).

This lady was one of those people who work hard to be liked by the client, and thus feed him with what he wants – rather than what he needs. Her speciality was doing focus groups, reaching the wrong conclusions, and then writing execrable advertising briefs to bamboozle the creative department. As Sir Frank Lowe used to remark about such meddlers, “You’re in the way old love”.

Some people on being given the bad news are like pro footballers arguing with the referee. The decision won’t change, but the tussle with inevitability is carried on to the bitter end. In this case, every technique was employed: astonishment, how dare you, threats, you’re wrong, I’ll go over your head, I’m already behind on the rent, etc etc etc. Eventually, my rubber band twiddling took on a different form: I stretched it from thumb to thumb, laid it out on the desk, or tried to make it into a square or circle as I explained how her obvious talent would be recognised in another agency before too long, nobody would be happier for her than me if was, and so forth. But by now, the young lady had moved onto the tack of quiet, earnest explanation of how – perhaps – she could transfer to another department.

I shall never know why, but as I explained the impossibility of even this seemingly reasonable request, I pulled the band out to full stretch and fixed the far end in line with a point just above the office door. I probably thought it made me look calm and philosophical – perhaps even unconcerned with her fate – as I pretended to analyse its critical path. Then the other end slipped from my grasp and zapped me on the nose.

I fell backwards off the seat, landed on the carpet with a sickening thud, and went “Ow shit! Shit! Shit!” very loudly. From the other side of the desk came the sound of hysterical laughter. There was no sympathy apparent within the mirth, which was rising in intensity with every second.

“Serves you f**king right,” she announced, and flounced from the room. There was no logic to the remark, but it was packed to the brim with triumph. Later I heard second hand that she rang Campaign (our trade magazine) with the story that the rubber-band incident had preceded the bad news, rather than the other way round, and hence I’d fired her in a fit of merciless bruised ego. Which only went to prove, despite all the pain that went with this dismissal, that I was right in my judgement that she had to go.

My favourite story of dismissal, by the way, concerns the day when Kelvin Mackenzie discovered that the astrologer on his paper was recycling old predictions, the longer to spend in his favourite watering hole of an afternoon. Mackenzie composed a letter, which began, “As you will already know…”.

Another former colleague, dispensing with the services of an especially obnoxious bloke, began (and ended) the process by saying “Now Dave, I’ve heard it said around here that we couldn’t do without you. But as from Monday, we’re gonna try”.

But most people don’t get fired because they’re taking the piss, perniciously political, or completely useless. They’re ‘laid off’ either because some clown screwed up on a $240m advertising account 7000 miles away, or an accountant in Geneva took out his Mont Blanc pen and wrote ‘ten off the headcount’ in the margin of a P&L report. It was why I grew to hate large corporations, ‘multinational dictates’, and The Shareholders. For a middle period lasting some twelve years, I worked against the trend in established or start-up privately-owned British agencies. The creative work was better, the fun-level far higher, and the bollocks absent. But it all had to end and – as always – it did so just as most of us were starting to realise what fun it was.

Twenty years on, the multinational bourse chickens are coming home to roost bigtime for the ordinary employee, talented or otherwise. It’s just another reason why, in the twilight years of a contemporary life, you no longer have to be a man of the Left to realise the futility and social damage being done by globalist exchanges with a near-monopoly of the money raising task. Globalists like big fat and faceless, not creative, fleet of foot and human. That’s why they too will have to be fired before too long.