Anybody who has watched the television phenomenon, “The Office”, or Mike Judge’s classic “Office Space”, will be familiar with Havens’ brand of humor. He takes delightful jabs at the familiar conventions of workforce SOP (that’s ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ to the uninitiated) like acronyms, Casual Friday, resume embellishment, and how you interact with fellow employees. The quips are often really clever and funny, (my favorite is: “How long was it before “Office Space” stopped making you laugh and started making you unaccountably sad?”) but unlike other mediums of office humor, Havens book has a deeper motivation.

The underlying point of “How to Get Fired!” is actually the opposite of its title. And that makes it a trickier duck to snatch since every point of the book serves a dual purpose. By teaching new graduates how not to act, Havens invariably slips in a winking nod on how entry level employees should behave. This can lead to some obvious conflicts where Havens is forced to mention something for the sake of making his deeper point that isn’t directly in line with his sense of humor. For instance, the approach of the book is not humorous. It’s written funny, but not structured funny. You’d expect there to be a number of incidental anecdotes about people who have gotten fired in awkward and hilarious ways. Instead, Havens takes the approach of a real self-help book which can be jarring if you haven’t already discovered the book’s subtext. After all, you don’t really need to know how to be fired.