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Redundancies in Great Britain refer to being dismissed from one’s workplace, typically through a layoff. At the beginning of “The Axe,” the Narrator, a middle manager, is tasked with dismissing four workers in his firm, including W.S. Singlebury.
Redundancies Quotes in The Axe
The The Axe quotes below are all either spoken by Redundancies or refer to Redundancies. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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The Axe Quotes
From this point on I feel able to write more freely, it being well understood, at office-managerial level, that you do not read more than the first two sentences of any given report. You believe that anything which cannot be put into two sentences is not worth attending to, a piece of wisdom which you usually attribute to the late Lord Beaverbrook.
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The actual notification to the redundant staff passed off rather better, in a way, than I had anticipated. By that time everyone in the office seemed inexplicably conversant with the details, and several of them had gone far beyond their terms of reference, young Patel, for instance, who openly admits that he will be leaving us as soon as he can get a better job, taking me aside and telling me that to such a man as Singlebury dismissal would be like death. Dismissal is not the right word, I said. But death is, Patel replied.
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