So a friend calls me a few months ago and tells me that he’s going to be fired. Brendan does something ambiguous for a bank, and the bank has been bought. Layoffs are on the way, but not yet: things are moving slowly, and they expect six months before anyone will know their fate. I had just finished Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came To The End, and I mentioned it to Brendan, like maybe he could relate.

“I am reading the book you recommended to me,” he wrote a few weeks later. “I am about halfway through, and it is pretty spot on. Everything that is described in there happens here. No work. A lot of gossip. And weird stuff. As far as I know no one steals things or writes on people's walls, but people are still weird. Also, no one is getting laid off now, so no one is walking spanish, not until July.”

Little bits of plot started showing up at the bottom of his e-mails. “Chris Yop just threw his chair into Lake Michigan.” “Benny sold the totem pole.” Last week, I got a text message that read, People walked spanish today, but not me.

Ferris’s book, about a workplace after the dot-com fall, takes at one point the Tom Waits lyric as slang for getting fired: “At first we called it what you would expect—getting laid off, being let go. Then we got creative. We said he’d gotten the ax, she’d be sacked, they’d all been shitcanned. Lately, a new phrase had appeared and really taken off. ‘Walking Spanish down the hall.’”

Don’t want to flog this idea too hard, but there it is—Ferris walks right out of his novel and into my friend’s office, and here’s the eerie part, when he gets fired, you know he’s carrying his box of personal effects out of there and thinking Tom Waits all the way to the door.

Glimpses of recognition. And why, to throw a rationale out here, we’re bothering to do this in the first place.