Reminders

"Time heals all wounds," they say. They lie. You learn to live with the aches.

I still find little pieces of swag hidden in my house. Here's a pen. There's a coaster. I went through a box of t-shirts destined for the trash, and found yet another instance of the logo of my previous employer. If physical reminders keep appearing, what hope is there to purge the ephemeral from my daily living?

My outdated biography is still on their web site. I wonder when they'll take it down. I can't figure out how to compose the right email to say "I no longer want any association with you."

It's not that I wish ill of my former coworkers. I believe their company is, ultimately, doomed -- but I wish most of them the best. I'm sure they're overworked and scared, and I know they're watching the numbers keep falling, falling, and falling. You can't cut a company into profitability. Sometimes you have to invest money to make money.

Mostly I just want this sense of betrayal and freefall to go away. If that means I have to excise all memory of them from my mind... I hope it doesn't go that far. I just want to grab someone there and say "If you don't want me around, fine. Just let me go."

Pity the Rich in a Recession

One of my persistent bafflements of the past few weeks has been the public statements of the company owner with regard to financial information. In particular, when he described the layoffs, he suggested that everyone needed to do more with less. That, at least, is certainly true for me and my former co-workers who need to figure out how to pay our mortgages, to feed our families, and to manage our health insurance. Another interesting comment he's made lately is that many banking failures in the United States were the result of greed. Greedy managers subsidized risk by spreading it to individual investors and employees and privatized reward by taking it for themselves. I suppose the multimillionare owner of a private business who's just laid off a few dozen employees to recover from poor business decisions in the previous month would know a few things about that.

Person Without Grace

Did you know that's what persona non grata means?

The behavior of my previous employer continues to surprise me. After disabling my email account and VPN access and expecting me to work from home for one final day -- how does that work, exactly? -- they decided to reenable my email account. No, they didn't restore access. They forwarded all of the mail to my personal account elsewhere.

Some of that mail includes confidential company information on various mailing lists. I responded to sales analysis figures the other day, saying "You should probably take me off of this list." It was almost two weeks after the layoffs. I received a very shocked response.

The company hadn't notified the remaining employees as to who they'd laid off.

Two weeks after the layoffs, people were still discovering holes and gaps in the current workflows. I responded to another message asking my opinion on one of the last projects I'd worked on before the layoffs, saying "I don't work here anymore; I can't help you."

I know I should redirect this incoming mail to a black hole... I really should, but I have a sick sense of enjoyment watching all of the scrambling business plans which rely on convincing people to work really hard for free so the company can swoop in and take its cut. I didn't like convincing people to work for free when I worked there, and their current scramble to find a working business model where they just can't spend any money now is sad and amusing.

I hadn't realized the company was in this much trouble while I was there. It's very sad -- sure, there are economic problems, but watching management jerk back and forth between throwing money at any potential new business venture and then pulling the rug out from under it when it fails to save the company in three months is... well, sad for my friends who still work there, but grimly amusing in retrospect.

Becoming a Statistic

We had a management meeting in November, when my manager wanted to assuage the fears of his direct reports. "I know times are tough," he said, "But the company is doing fine." We talked about metrics and revenue and such, and then had a brief session of sharing our feelings. My two colleagues said that they were worried and talked about that some. Then it was my turn.

"I'm not the worrying type," I said.

It's true. I'm not. I like to know where my next meal will come from, and I want a comfortable place to sleep and a hot shower in the morning. Beyond that, I'm flexible about where I am and what's going on.

I'd pooh-poohed the idea of a recession for a while. I know the economic definition, but my real wages rose tremendously in the past decade. I was much better off than I was in the Clinton years.

Now... perhaps it's good in the personal growth sense that every new "Unemployment Numbers on the Rise" story means a little bit more to me. I'm a tiny blip in that sea of people without a job at the moment. I'm still very fortunate in that my mortgage is secure and my skills are fresh and my resume is strong, but I'm a statistic.

That's also horribly insulting. I'm not the guy people ask about specific subjects at work. I'm not the person who gets tricky assignments because I work hard and I do things well. I'm not the expert who's been around for several years and is reliable and responsible and insightful.

I'm just a line on an expense report that the company no longer has to pay.

I'm just one more job loss added to a sea of confused and angry and hurting people.

I'm just one more entry in the state's unemployment register.

I'm just one more resume in a stack of 800 people applying for 30 open positions.

I was proud of my job. I was proud of the company. I was proud to give people my business card.

Now I'm insulted and embarrassed that for all of my pride and all of my hard work and all of my loyalty, I was just a statistic to them.

Boxing and Garaging Swag

I mentioned that I gave presentations for the company. I've done this for several years; it was part of my first job there. Like any good company sending out worker drones to give presentations, we have a lot of swag. Giving away shirts, pens, mugs, calendars, notebooks, bags, and whatever makes people happy.

I had a lot of swag myself.

For my Wednesday presentation before the layoff (was it really only two weeks ago?) I had a backpack full of swag. It was mostly shirts, but there were other nice items as well. After my presentation, I handed them out. It was fun. I've always enjoyed doing this.

That was Wednesday. On Friday, I gathered up all of the swag I could find in my house into a couple of big boxes. They're in my garage now.

I didn't want reminders anymore. I didn't want my only clean shirt option to give free advertising to a company whose goals were very different from my goals. I didn't want to reach for a pen I was once proud to use.

Maybe it was immature of me, but it felt like packing a suitcase to come home from a vacation. It was a tangible, tactile act of separation. It felt sad, but it also felt appropriate. Besides, the shirts weren't that nice.

I do miss the pens though.

Just Before a Holiday

"It's not personal," they said. "We just have to save money."

When I was last in the office on Tuesday, someone walked into our little group area. "Anyone have fun plans for the three-day weekend?" No one else knew what she was talking about. "Monday's a holiday," she said. "It's Martin Luther King, Jr. day. We have it off."

That was the hit of the conversation for the day. Everyone else had forgotten that Monday was a paid holiday. There were a few bursts of chatter about plans for the long weekend. I looked forward to sleeping in one extra day. Maybe I'd do some house cleaning, and work on a writing project I'd long set aside. Maybe I'd go see a movie -- I haven't done that in ages.

Of course, getting laid off on a Thursday before the Friday before a three-day weekend means your company doesn't have to pay you for that holiday... but it's not personal. Keep repeating that. How rude it would be if it had been personal?

Loss

I felt productive that afternoon. I keep a detailed budget, though expenses are mostly after the fact -- I track what I've spent and have a sense in my mind about how much I've spent every month and how much I can spend. I decided to cut some non-essential budget items and saved a few hundred dollars a month. I'd also filed for unemployment and taken care of a few other administrative tasks.

I slept very fitfully, however. Every few minutes, another worry skittered through my mind. I'd kept a good budget. I had a great financial plan which would have led to my financial independence in the next ten or twelve years, depending on investments.

All of a sudden, my ex-employer had pulled the rug away. That's not like yanking a tablecloth from under a dinner setting and a crystal vase containing a single red rose. There, you have a little wobble as the audience gasps, but even the salad fork and the dessert fork stay in position.

Instead, I had to worry about paying my own insurance again. There'd be no chances apply additional payments to my mortgage. My 401k would stagnate -- worse yet, in December I'd increased my contributions because I believe now is a great time to buy!

Then the worst news hit me. How would I refinance my mortgage? I kept watching rates fall, week over week, thinking "I could refinance to a 20-year mortgage and pay less per month and still pay it off sooner than I would if I kept my current mortgage!" That's no longer an option.

Maybe I'm a fool for predicating plans on the whims of an employer who, in retrospect, very obviously found me expendable, but I had to rethink a lot of my future that night, and I didn't sleep well. I decided to stop pretending I'd get more sleep at 8:30 the next morning and finally concluded that the previous day really hadn't been a dream. Yippee.