Dwight has been working for Dunder Mifflin, an average tech company in an average suburban city, for almost 25 years. At the age of 59, he’s beginning to look forward to his retirement, when he’ll move with his wife to be closer to his children and grandchildren who live several hours away. Unfortunately for Dwight and his wife, with the recent trouble in the housing market, he had to pull some money out of his 401k early in order to keep their home. As such, Dwight knows he’s going to need to keep working for Dunder Mifflin until he’s 67 (rather than 65) in order to make up some of what he has lost.
Every year, his company hires a batch of new employees who are fresh out of college. They’re always those young Millennial types – educated, quick to pick up technology, and full of lots of ideas. While Dwight has viewed them as a bit of a threat to his job security in the past, the new hires have never really impacted him because they’ve never been assigned to his team.
But this year is different. The 25-year-old new hire Jim has been assigned to Dwight’s team. Jim has already been trained in all of the technologies that Dunder Mifflin is trying to begin using as part of one of their new corporate initiatives. Dwight kept his distance from Jim, because as long as Dwight kept hold of the inside-knowledge about the team that he had acquired in his 25 years with the company, he felt that his job would be secure. All of this came crashing down just a few weeks later when Dwight’s boss told him he would be let go at the end of the month. The real punch to the gut was when his boss told him that he would have to train Jim as his replacement before he left.