[Severance] Burt Goodman's Weird Week
Imagine you’re a gay, married man who works at Lumon’s severed floor and therefore has no recollection of anything that happens during his 9-to-5, and one evening your boss comes to your house after hours to tell you you’re being fired because your worksona was being gay on company time. You are allowed to record a video for his retirement party, and you record yourself telling him and his unsanctioned workplace lover and friends that they are important to both versions of you. Of course, you don’t know the only reason said unsanctioned lover was even at the funeral or aware that your worksona was essentially getting executed was because he escaped his office (locked from the outside) to make sure you were not being tortured for helping him and his friends plan a coup.
But that’s your worksona, and this is you, so you plan a trip to Milwaukee with your husband to reaffirm your relationship. The night you’re packing, a stranger shows up at your doorstep screaming your name and banging on the door, but when you come out, he’s driving away. Your husband thinks that’s your worksona’s lover and cancels the trip but encourages you to go look for him.
You wait near the phone booth where the stranger sometimes comes to make clandestine phone calls, and when you finally make contact, he’s been fired too— but he was permanently suspended because he spotted the CEO-in-waiting pretending to be his friend to spy on the department and rape his other friend, and he doesn’t know any of this, or about his unsanctioned erotic affair, just that his worksona is dead, and he worries it’s his fault.
He doesn’t know you, and you don’t know him, and he apologizes for having hurt your marriage and having yelled at you for stalking him, but you offer him a space to talk and grieve. a community he doesn’t have outside of work, that he doesn’t even know his worksona had at work, that was taken alongside his very existence as punishment.
This happened to my good friend Burt Goodman.