Yahoo isn't firing people en masse — it's "getting fit." That noisome euphemism for today's layoffs of 1,500 people must have hissed forth from the brain of some overpaid management consultant. Likewise for pages upon pages of instructions on how to sack employees — which Valleywag has obtained.

Thousands of Yahoo employees have been waiting months to find out if they're going to be laid off. Today they'll know for sure when their managers say the magic words.

Yahoo's script for performing the layoff begins when the boss walks up to an employee getting the sack. And then he says, "Thank you, [FIRST NAME HERE], for coming in. I have some information regarding our organization I'd like to tell you in person." The anodyne managementspeak just gets worse from there: "I appreciate what you have done for Yahoo."

We don't think Yahoo's layoff procedures are worse than any other big corporation's. Instead, they're depressingly ordinary for a company which once promised to reinvent the media business. Here's how the doomed will find out they no longer Yahoo: