Basic Trope: A character who really should get fired escapes punishment, usually thanks to their competence.
- Straight: Alice routinely talks down to her coworkers and superiors, but because she's so skilled, the fine folks at Trope Co. never let her go.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice is rude to literally everyone for no good reason. But she still doesn't get fired.
- Alice punches out her boss and several coworkers daily. This gets her promoted.
- Alice is a schizophrenic who has regularly flooded the halls of Trope Co. and backstroked around the building nude while she was supposed to be in a meeting. She doesn't get fired because she has boobs and the boss is always calling her damage "cute" and saying "I never really liked that statue anyway."
- Alice still works for Trope Co. even though she is, in fact, incompetent and can't or won't improve herself.
- Alice is routinely rude to her coworkers, and has never been fired even though no one knows what her job is.
- Alice murdered one of her coworkers and is still working there.
- Alice is known to have embezzled from Trope Co. and may still be double-dipping, but she still works there.
- Downplayed:
- Alice's overall record is good, so she gets away with making mistakes that a newcomer couldn't.
- Alice's job status at the company changes from day to day, but she can get away with things most of the time.
- Justified:
- Alice is exceptionally skilled, and finding or training a replacement would take far too much time and money. Trope Co. see no option but to tolerate her, for better or worse.
- Alice has a Benevolent Boss who doesn't believe in firing.
- It's a Family Business, and Alice's family members don't want to fire her. Or her immediate supervisor isn't a member of the family, but Alice is, and so she's untouchable.
- Alice is working in a department but not for that department, and while the supervisor Bob complains to her supervisor, he can't make her supervisor take any action against her.
- Employment law in this setting heavily favors the employee rather than the employer, making firing difficult or even impossible for all but the grossest misconduct.
- Alice is a union member, maybe even a very high-ranking union member, and firing her is complicated or impossible.
- Alice has minimal supervision.
- Alice works far from the people who could discipline her — not in the main building, maybe not even in the same country as the main building. The people she works with may well complain, but their complaints never make it to somebody who could make her shape up or ship out.
- Alice owns the business.
- Alice works in academia, and she has full tenure, so unless she does something criminal, she won't be fired.
- Alice's workplace is a psychiatric institute meant to keep crazies like her in check.
- Alice is related to a wealthy benefactor, which was how she got the job to begin with, and the company is too afraid of losing her family's favor to do anything about her.
- Alice is in a protected class and HR is too afraid of a lawsuit or bad press to handle her.
- Alice works a community-facing job where she serves as an important liaison with many socioeconomically diverse people, has built up a strong rapport with them, and the organization is afraid of the backlash that could result if she goes, especially given the chance that she will say untrue and/or heavily misrepresented but extremely damaging things if something happens to her.
- Alice is blackmailing her boss into keeping her on staff because Bethany the boss is a major player in some extremely illegal and unethical things that the company is up to, and she's buying her silence.
- Alice is union, but actually was effectively fired once because management did their homework and built an ironclad case that she couldn't successfully grievance. She got her job back because she sued the company and the union for conspiracy to violate the bargaining agreement, and even though she didn't have a case, they opted to settle and one of the terms was reinstating her.
- Inverted:
- Subverted:
- Alice finally commits the ultimate offense and finally gets fired.
- Alice is the owner-operator of the business, so she has to do right by her customers or she'll have to go out of business.
- Alice gets laid off.
- Alice is a union member, but the union loathes her and has told her in no uncertain terms that they will do the bare minimum to investigate any grievances she tries to file.
- Double Subverted:
- Alice is promptly rehired because she's the only one who can solve a problem.
- She's the owner-operator of a restaurant. The food is terrible, the conditions in the kitchen and storage area are execrable, her staff get IOUs instead of paychecks, and she only gets one or two customers a night (who usually decide not to return). But somehow, she's still in business.
- The layoff is unrelated to her performance or conduct. It was just time to downsize, and Alice had to go.
- Alice has made up the difference in the past by suing the union for breaching the duty of fair representation, and the union has accepted that it's easier to grin and bear it rather than slug it out in court with her.
- Parodied:
- Alice is presented with irrefutable evidence of misconduct and/or incompetence at her job. She defends herself with a completely unbelievable excuse which somehow gets her off the hook.
- Alice eventually gets fired ... from a cannon.
- Zig-Zagged:
- After six years of getting away with things she shouldn't have, Alice finally gets fired over a Noodle Incident. Then her boss offers her the job back, but she declines.
- Alice regularly does face disciplinary action for her behavior, but whenever she suspects that a case is being built against her, she files official complaints against her department, which both ties up HR's time in investigating them and makes them understandably reluctant to continue course for fear of Alice making a retaliation claim. She doesn't officially have absolute job security, but in practice, the company is simply too afraid of a lawsuit to fire her.
- Averted:
- Alice is either exceptionally skilled and incredibly nice, or of average skills and temperament.
- Alice doesn't work.
- Enforced: "We need a character who's incredibly skilled but a huge jackass! That's how it works in real life, right?"
- Lampshaded:
- "Oh, goody ... I get to work with Alice. I'm so looking forward to her criticizing everything about me."
- "I'm so vital to this company, I can do whatever I want!"
- "Alice got caught directing employees to falsify data on logs we send to our accrediting body, went and cried to HR about how she was being bullied when I asked her what the fuck she was thinking because I couldn't fire her on the spot, and HR actually took her side and I was written up. I guess that's what happens when you're the CFO's useless daughter: you become untouchable."
- Invoked: Alice designs the computer system herself and refuses to tell anyone else how it works, thus making herself irreplaceable.
- Exploited: Alice can get away with pretty much anything short of murder, so the other employees are always asking favors of her.
- Defied:
- Alice's superiors tell her in no uncertain terms that, notwithstanding her incredible skills, they won't give her any special treatment and that she must act the same way everyone else does.
- Although Alice is the business owner, she doesn't do right by her customers, so they can't keep her in business, and since she doesn't do right by her staff, they quit. So, being up to her eyeballs in debt (and not making a profit), she has no choice but to close down and sell the place.
- Alice is the picture of professional conduct whenever she's on the clock.
- Bob goes straight to the leader of Alice’s union to negotiate an arrangement that can benefit the union if they allow him to fire Alice — whether that arrangement is "Bob records a video of himself singing 'Let It Go'" or "the union's leader gets to live" depends on the writer.
- Discussed:Mr. Pointyhair: You're fired, Alice!Alice: But, Mr. Pointyhair, I thought you said I was irreplaceable.
- Conversed:
- "Why hasn't Alice been fired yet? It seems like she shouldn't have this job anymore."
- "Ugh! These TV types frustrate me. If I acted that way at my job, they'd fire my ass so fast my head would spin!"
- Deconstructed: Despite her prodigious skill, everyone hates Alice. She may not get fired, but her coworkers ensure that her job won't be a cakewalk as well.
- Reconstructed: Loath as they are to admit it, Alice's coworkers acknowledge that her skills truly are the best — and they'll follow her, for better or worse.
- Played for Laughs: Alice sings whatever song she wants at the top of her lungs (in her atrocious singing voice), moonwalks everywhere, browses porn on the Internet, and other things with impunity.
- Played for Drama:
- Several of Alice's best colleagues — that is to say, those who balance common sense with ability to do the job — quit out of disgust with her antics. The show then gives each of them A Day in the Limelight and makes no bones about how far they've fallen without the solid career they formerly enjoyed.
- One of Alice's colleagues murders her — a tough case for the detectives.
- Alice is kept on staff despite her horrible personality and worse performance largely because she knows where the bodies are hidden. All the cooked books, doctored financial statements, fraudulent lot documentation and internal records to cover up defective products that they sent to customers and regulatory authorities, multiple sexual harassment and workplace discrimination claims that the company actively swept under the rug, numerous cases of retaliation against former employees who tried to bring claims against the company (for his trouble, Charlie got his professional license revoked and the company lied about him to shut him out of his field permanently afterwards), and several serious workplace injuries that they not only failed to report, but about whose circumstances they lied to the worker's compensation office: these secrets are safe with Alice. After her (complicit) old boss Alan leaves, in comes Bethany, who won't play but also doesn't understand the extent of the misconduct Alice has been keeping quiet. In months, Alice is fired, and she promptly tells the relevant authorities everything she knows. Heads roll at every level, and the company is crippled and ultimately absorbed by a larger entity within the next year and a half.
- Played for Horror: Alice is the only employee of Trope Co. as of the pilot episode who hasn't been fired by the finale ... and she's the resident Torture Technician, she enjoys it, and she won't be fired because Trope Co. is Evil, Inc.
- Implied: Alice appears only rarely but when she appears, she's usually antisocial and doing something wrongly or wrong. Regardless, she keeps coming back to work at Trope Co.
We can't fire you, even if you don't go back to Ultimate Job Security.
