Layoffs are back, baby. Like clockwork. Just when you thought maybe, just maybe, this year you wouldn’t have to play career Russian roulette, HR shows up with their clipboard and fake sympathy voice. It’s the HR Hunger Games reaping: “May the odds be never in your favor, peasant.”

Step one of this circus: the “voluntary retirement” scam. Management trots out the speech about “helping your coworkers” like it’s some noble sacrifice. Yeah, because your extra $2 an hour is single-handedly bankrupting a billion-dollar corporation. The only ones who take it are the poor bastards with a conscience, not because they’re ready, but because they actually care about people. Joke’s on the company, though—those lifers walk out with decades of tribal knowledge nobody bothered to document. Suddenly, management realizes the entire factory runs on “Bob knows how to fix that thing.” Now Bob’s gone, and they’ve got two clueless twenty-somethings trying to do Bob’s job while Googling “what does that machine even do?”

Step two: The Firing Squad. HR drags you into a little room one by one like some knockoff reality show. “Congratulations, you no longer work here! But here’s your lovely parting gift: one week’s pay for every so many years you busted your ass.” Volunteers don’t get it, of course. Because loyalty in this company is rewarded with… absolutely jack shit.

Then comes the corporate gymnastics routine. “We’re not ageist!” they squeal, while shoving every 60+ employee out the door. To make it look legit, they sprinkle in a random thirty-year-old and one washed-up manager. Because nothing says “fair and balanced” like firing Grandpa Joe two months before retirement and then tossing Chad from accounting into the mix as cover.

What follows is six months of pure hell. Departments running on skeleton crews, everyone playing musical chairs, and overtime piling up like bad debt. But hey, the PowerPoint presentation must’ve looked fantastic for the execs who haven’t set foot on the shop floor since the Bush administration.

And then the cherry on this shit sundae: the customers come crawling back. Turns out the new company they switched to was even worse at lying through their teeth. Now management scrambles to rehire everyone they tossed aside like trash. Out of 50, maybe 10 come back—and management has the balls to act like we abandoned them.

And don’t worry, this isn’t a one-off. Nope. Every four years like clockwork, whenever a presidential election shows up, the big wigs lose their damn minds. Not because they’re broke—they’re still making billions—but because they might not get that sweet extra 25% profit increase. God forbid the CEO has to cut his vacation from two months in Tuscany to one, or worse, spend quality time with the kids he’s been outsourcing to the nanny since birth.

So yeah. Welcome to the Layoff Hunger Games. Grab your cardboard box, pack up your dignity, and don’t forget—management is still going to ask you to train your replacement on the way out.