A second wave of economic bad news is arriving in several places, according to people in finance. "But instead of sacking people, my boss is adjusting our contracts," grumbled a reader in an email from New York.

I had no sympathy for him. Adjusting their contracts? Pah! In Asian firms, we get sacked all the time, sometimes several times a day. There are no negotiations. A Singaporean reader told me about a firm which sacked hundreds of people by setting off the fire alarm, ushering them outside, and then disabling their staff cards. And those are the NICE bosses. Others just use masked death squads in Ninja outfits to ensure staff disappear quietly. (You can now hire these at outplacement firms in Asian cities.)

I’ve been sacked loads of times. However, now that I am mature and well-adjusted, I get booted out slightly less often than I did when I was irresponsible and naïve in the dim and distant past (ie, last month). There’s a reason for this. These days I know exactly which situations will get me sacked. To help people who may be in the same situation, here are 10 signs you’ll soon be unemployed.

1. You return from a week’s vacation to find that you had scheduled THIS week as vacation, not last week.

2. The email in which you wittily described your boss as "Hitler without the redeeming features" was accidentally cc’d to "All Staff".

3. That cute new employee you unsuccessfully hit on turns out to be head of the Lesbian Lawyers Alliance AND the chairman’s daughter.

4. You wake up naked under the boardroom table just as the door opens and the directors file in.

5. Arriving at your destination on a business trip, you check your papers and discover that you have gone to the wrong continent.

6. The milk you "borrowed" from the company fridge in the R and D department wasn’t milk and no one will tell you what it was.

7. The bad driver to whom you gave the one finger sign on your way to the office turns out to be the new director of human resources.

8. You take a "sick" day because you were up most of the night watching a TV sports final and the following morning the boss says, "So, I hear you had a late night?"

9. An off-color joke you forwarded to "All staff" contained a Trojan super-virus which shut down company computers worldwide.

10. After your project team gets the company listed on the stock market, you realize that your data had the decimal point in the wrong place.

And that was just my first month. After that, I made some SERIOUS mistakes. But here’s the good news: Don’t worry. After the first three or four times, being sacked doesn’t hurt at all.

The human resources guy just comes into your office with THAT LOOK in his eye, and you just say, "Okay, whatever, I’ll start packing my stuff." (Sometimes I hadn’t finished unpacking it from the previous move.)

But timing is everything. It can be a huge advantage to know exactly when you will receive the white envelope containing your marching orders. Tomorrow: how to tell when have achieved the terminal state of employment known as Dead Man Working.