I only caught a glimpse of the headline over someone's shoulder on the Northern Line - “Boss fined for removing wife by e-mail,” it said - but appreciated the significance of the story immediately.

There have, of course, been precedents for technologically brutal sackings. In 2003, The Accident Group, a company that specialised in personal injury claims, sent its staff a text message that led to many of them discovering they had been made redundant. And in 2007 bosses at Robbs, a store in the market town of Hexham, set off a fire alarm and assembled the workforce in the car park to inform them they no longer had jobs.

There have also been precedents for technologically brutal dumpings. Phil Collins once famously let his second wife, Jill Tavelman, know about the end of their marriage by fax, while Britney Spears made him look positively romantic by dumping Kevin Federline by text message.

But this was the first time I'd come across an instance of someone seemingly combining the two. It raised a number of fascinating questions, including: is it ever OK to fire someone by e-mail?; is it ever OK to dump someone by e-mail?; and which of the two acts is worse?

In attempting to provide answers I realise I shouldn't get carried away drawing parallels between letting go of employees and spouses. There are, on reflection, profound differences. The cowardly option of getting someone else, human resources departments or external consultants, to do your dirty work is rarely an option with personal relationships, as it is in business.

If your average dumper arranged for security guards to escort a former partner out of a building after terminating a relationship, he or she would risk eventual violent retaliation. And while it is, in the context of work, important not to imply that age or sex or race have been factors, you can get away with it in your personal life, especially if you've suddenly realised you're gay or a man trapped in a woman's body.

Meanwhile, there is the simple but important difference that it is much harder to fire someone than to dump someone. Leaving aside the question of how you sack a person from a position they don't have yet, one of the ways in which The Apprentice presents an unrealistic picture of business is the ease with which Sir Alan gets rid of people.

In the real world, unless someone has molested the office dog or attempted to snort cocaine off the chairman's forehead, or unless lots of people are being made redundant as a result of a financial emergency, as they were at The Accident Group or Robbs, it is virtually impossible to fire people without first proffering a series of verbal and written warnings.

There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, ranging from the it's-not-you-it's-me approach, to the settle-down-and-wait-until-the-other-person-dies-of-boredom option but there's only one realistic strategy open to employers.

However, having provided these caveats, it is undeniably the case that there are parallels between sackings and dumpings. Both are usually private acts, with the person doing the terminating having no way of predicting the reaction of the dumpee. Both should ideally take place on neutral ground, so either party can walk away if it gets nasty. It is important in both to avoid making gratuitous remarks. And, coming to the question of e-mail, the importance of the medium by which the terminating is done is often overemphasised in both.

The upsetting thing for anyone being “let go” is that they are being “let go”. If you did it face to face over dinner at J Sheekey's, or during a luxury back massage in the Mandarin Oriental, they would still be very upset. The key thing is to deliver the news directly and quickly, to ensure they don't find out by other means. I would, frankly, rather be fired by fire alarm or e-mail than hear about it via the tea lady or realise when my vending card failed to let me purchase a Twix in the staff canteen.

Nevertheless, I would concede there is something cowardly about using e-mail and would argue that you're on more dubious moral ground if you use it in business than in romance. This is because people are not generally recruited and managed by electronic means and should therefore not be fired that way but a large amount of seduction and flirtation does now happen over computers and phones.

Indeed, e-mail relationship terminations are becoming commonplace: according to a survey, 15 per cent of Britons say they have been dumped by text or e-mail. Furthermore, it was recently decided in Malaysia that a man could divorce his wife with a text message. The Government's adviser on religious affairs argued that, provided the message was unambiguous, it was valid under Sharia because texting was just another type of writing.

By contrast, instances of electronic firings remain rare, not least because of the aforementioned legal obligation for employers to keep dysfunctional relationships going like an unhappy, sexless marriage. And, on reading the full news story at work, it was no surprise to discover that the “boss”, one Berin Riley, age 41, lost the employment tribunal against his wife, Trudi Riley, 36, on the grounds that he had not followed the correct employment procedures when he sent her an e-mail saying she was surplus to requirements at his removals company, Channelmoving.com.

Ashford employment tribunal in Kent ruled that she had been unfairly dismissed from her £18,000-a-year office job and Mr Riley was instructed to pay his wife - to whom he gave no verbal warnings - £3,000 in lost earnings.

The final line of the news story was perhaps as predictable as the headline had been striking: “The couple are seeking a divorce,” it announced.

sathnam@thetimes.com

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