They Fired Me by Mistake, Then Rehired Me as a Total Stranger

I have now been hired at the same company twice, which sounds like loyalty and was actually a clerical accident that spiraled into the strangest month of my working life.

It started with an email on a Friday afternoon that said, in the flat voice of an automated system, that my employment had been terminated effective immediately and I should return my equipment. I had not been fired. I had, that morning, been praised in a team meeting for a thing I did with a database that I still do not fully understand. I read the email four times. My badge stopped working while I was reading it. That is how I knew it was real, or real enough.

I called my manager. Voicemail. I called HR. A menu. I emailed everyone I could think of with the subject line "URGENT I have apparently been fired?" and got three auto-replies and a note from someone in IT saying my account had been "deprovisioned per the offboarding ticket," a ticket nobody could tell me who had opened.

Here is what actually happened, which I only pieced together later. There were two of us with the same first initial and last name in the system. The other one resigned. A tired person in a shared services center on another continent closed the wrong record. In the machinery of a large company, being closed is the same as being gone. There was no villain. There was just a wrong click, and then the entire apparatus of the corporation smoothly, efficiently, expelled me.

I spent the weekend in a specific kind of dread. On Monday, before I had managed to reach a single human who could fix it, my phone rang. It was a recruiter. From my company. She was warm and professional and she said she had a "fantastic opportunity" she thought I would be perfect for. She described my job. My actual job. The one I had been doing on Thursday. She read my own responsibilities back to me off a req that had been opened, I realized, to backfill the vacancy created by firing me.