While working at the French advertising agency, Baldwin became acquainted with a co-worker named S茅bastien who did literally almost no work at the office, constantly missed deadlines, and sometimes wouldn't show up at work for several days in a row. Baldwin couldn't believe he still had a job and asked other workers why this was the case. "You can't fire someone in France, Olivier explained," Baldwin wrote. "It's too difficult, Tomaso said. 'You simply stop giving them things to do,' Fran莽oise said, 'and they sit in a corner for a few years, and you hope they quit. That's how it works.' " Later, having gotten fed up, Baldwin's boss Pierre, a Frenchman who had lived in New York, fired S茅bastien. S茅bastien and the rest of the office were aghast. "He knew he'd done wrong," Baldwin wrote of S茅bastien. "Now he felt he'd been done wrong.... Fired, as in fired-fired? About half the office, who had despised working with S茅bastien and had said so out loud while S茅bastien listened to electro-clash in his peony headphones, still didn't see why Pierre had needed to purge him... .people made Pierre out to be a villain. He'd broken an unspoken trust. The same people attributed Pierre's firing S茅bastien to the influence of Pierre's years working in New York."
