Fat, Forty and Fired

This is the comedy I sought out, by Nigel Marsh, and although it is funny in parts, it was also very irritating. For one thing, the title is a lie; he wasn’t fired, he was given the choice of a new job or a very generous retrenchment package, so generous he was able to live on it for a year – so long as the nanny and the second car went. Yes, he is and was a very, very wealthy man, and the worst part was that he scarcely seems to realise it. In his year off, he travels through Europe – and not backpacking, let me add – has a few other trips in Australia, and spends every day swimming at the beach, as well as doing the school run. His wife doesn’t work either (they have four children between four and six) and must be very long-suffering, as he admits to being an alcoholic with anger management issues – which return in less than a year, when he accepts another generous job offer and goes back to being a CEO. Yes, there’s definitely some funny segments in this book, and yes, it’s nice that he takes some time off to reconnect with his family. But this rambling memoir can’t be taken seriously, simply because most people would never find themselves in that situation. Fat, forty, and fired, yes; able to take a year off and sustain a family of six in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney based on a retrenchment package, with the knowledge that a job would appear whenever one feels up to it again? Unlikely. This guy hasn’t got a clue, and that’s what I really didn’t find very funny at all.