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.

Qualified To Do... What?

To receive unemployment benefits in this state, you have to be an active job seeker. To prove that, you have to register with a Department of Employment-sponsored web site. Fortunately it's not completely insane; it remembers a lot of the details of your work history from your unemployment claim.

You also have to select one or more job titles. For each title, you choose each of a list of skills for which you either have experience or training. I had six diverse titles and between 15 and 20 skills for each. After that, it gives you a list of matching job opportunities. I pressed the button and held my breath.

Remember that I've spent most of the last year managing a small, technical staff of subject matter experts.

There was one result -- for a senior Cold Fusion web developer position. No wonder my previous employer let me go. I'm apparently unemployable.

Nothing Hurts More than Paperwork

My severance package included a couple of checks, a severance agreement, a cover letter, and a printout of the state unemployment registration help web pages. That's right -- a printout of a web page. That was almost as helpful as asking for an outline of a presentation and getting a printout of PowerPoint slides, two per page.

I decided to apply for unemployment just then, and flipped through several pages of useless instructions.

The unemployment site wanted lots of details about my work history. Do you know how far out of date my resume is? Life gets more complicated because I occasionally do consulting work on the side. Instead of handling a 1099 myself and doing all of the withholding there, I do that work through a small cooperative which takes a fraction of the money to cover its expenses and then runs payroll as if I were an employee.

If you want to argue my work status very, very technically, I'm an employee of that company, even if they haven't paid me in a year because I haven't done any work for them in a year. How do you fill that out?

I did the best I could, flipping through web forms with magic appearing and disappearing flashy buttons, before learning that the result is someone at the employment office will send me postal mail with my information to confirm and send back -- or something.

It's almost worth it for $500/week, pre-tax. I decided that the incessant and useless paperwork of filing for unemployment, switching health insurance, managing my 401(k), et cetera is just about the final insult here. I may have been wrong in thinking that though....

Locked Out

With all of the notifying done (and waiting for my severance agreement to arrive), I still had work to do. I'd promised my boss that I'd finish up as much work as possible, and I had a couple of small projects in progress that I thought I reasonably could finish.

There was one problem. They'd disabled my email account already.

I have an address book on my personal laptop, so I had the email addresses of the people I absolutely most needed to talk to, but I had no idea what was going on with my projects as I hadn't checked my messages since before my presentation the day before.

Do you know how difficult it is to finish a collaborative project when you don't know if your collaborators have made any changes?

I won't guarantee that Thursday's work was my best work, but I finished three out of four projects I had hoped to finish. That leaves a lot undone, but it was 6 o'clock by then, and I figured I'd earned my final day's pay.

Normally when people leave the company (voluntarily, anyway), they send a message to the company-wide mailing list, talking about their plans and thanking people who made a difference to their work. I can imagine that a barrage of "You suck!" messages would be even more demoralizing than realizing that a lot of your co-workers are gone and you'll have to do even more work with fewer resources, but terminating email access and expecting people to do their work anyway seems rather silly.

Then I realized something worse. I had a freelance contract with another company division, just to make some extra cash. That project was almost complete too -- and I'd been using my company address for that.

No extra cash. No deadline. No status update. I decided that what I needed most was to go out with the guys for curry, a drink, and some basketball on TV.

Shock, Family, and Friends

After HR and my boss hung up on me ("We may have some contracting work, so I'll call you tomorrow or maybe Monday", he said. Monday's a paid holiday for the company.), I made some phone calls myself.

"We had layoffs," I told my girlfriend. We already had a lunch date, so we agreed to talk more then.

My brother was also sympathetic. He'd gone through layoffs a few years earlier, so he had a good sense of what I needed to do next.

Finally I called my parents. I don't remember the call very well, but I think I was uncharacteristically upbeat. "You know," I said, "I've saved up a little cushion just in case something like this happened. I'm sort of glad it was me and not my brother." (He has a wife and kids; I'm single.)

On the drive to lunch, I told my girlfriend about some consulting work I'd turned down last year. "It was just an experiment, an attempt to see how that work relationship would go. It sounded really good, but then I took the promotion at work and didn't have time and it fizzled out. Maybe they're interested in reviving it."

She kept staring at me through lunch. "I'm just so sorry," she said. "I think I'm more sad about this than you. You have all of these plans and you haven't let this spoil your mood. I just don't understand you."

I couldn't finish my burger, and though she wanted a piece of chocolate cake for dessert, I wasn't in the mood. Maybe it was the three big glasses of raspberry lemonade. We took the cake and a piece of peanut butter pie to go, then came back to my house. "I feel a little bit relieved, you know?" I told her. "It feels like when you finish all of your work before a vacation and you know there's nothing left undone to nag at you when you get back. That's kind of nice, in some ways."

I spent the rest of the afternoon going through my expenses, trying to find places to cut fat out of my budget. Some $400/month lighter, I should be able to stretch my savings further.

FedEx knocked on my door after 5, with my severance agreement and outplacement papers. The latter were a printout of the state "How to apply for unemployment" webpages. Helpful.

But I Was Just in the Office!

As I suggested in the previous post, where we all had to drink tap water (yick), this whole mess came as a big surprise. My management group had talked the previous week about improving how we measured my employees' performance. I resisted a little bit at first. "I don't want to tie evaluations strictly to the metrics we can most easily measure," I said. Eventually we agreed that we'd use these metrics as a gauge on how we invested our resources of time and money.

I'd been talking to my boss off and on about making sure we had a plan and had solid evidence that our plan was working, or, if not, that we could adjust our plan to fit what actually happened. He didn't seem concerned that our group was in any financial trouble.

I should back up. I'd worked in this group for several years, through a couple of restructurings. The latest restructuring was the middle of last year, when I became a manager in the group. After several years of realizing that the group as it had existed didn't make any money and wouldn't make any money, my boss successfully argued that it should merge with a similar group. Everyone knew that this was a long-term investment, and I'd had assurance from other company directors that they were investing in its future and just wanted us to show that we were improving things. (There was also the verbal promise that they'd "take care of me" as a valuable employee they wanted to keep around, but you know, somehow I failed to get that written down.)

In my staff meeting on Tuesday (again, see previous post), we talked a little bit about those measurements. As expected, I had the top numbers, and my direct reports were at the top of the list too. It's amazing what you get when you pay people directly, instead of piecework doled out to freelancers once in a while. We also talked about our longer-term plans, including some stratetic agreements with another company which would increase our market reach tremendously.

On Tuesday, my boss asked if I had a few minutes, and showed me some mockups of our new website design. It was great. I mentioned a couple of improvements I liked and made a couple of suggestions, and he seemed satisfied -- at least before another company director pulled him away for a quick chat.

I had no idea, of course, that while I was preparing for my presentation the next day, they'd be working on my severance agreement and sending out my final paycheck via FedEx.

Instead, one of my coworkers said "Hey, you want to take some swag to your presentation tomorrow?" That's a story for another time, though.

Everyone Was Thirsty, Which Should Have Tipped Us Off

I was in the office on Monday and Tuesday, but I had a presentation to give out of the office on Wednesday and planned to work from home on Thursday. I was in a large strategy meeting Monday afternoon (we had those twice a year -- like I said, a large strategy meeting). I had to duck out for a meeting with my own staff on Monday afternoon.

Tuesday morning, I grabbed a desk early (flexible seating program) and immediately heard the water cooler conversation. "Oh, there's no water today."

My department was right next to a little break room in the middle of the floor. The water cooler sits off to the side, and there's usually a pile of full and empty five gallon jugs of water there. For some reason, we hadn't had new water delivered since the start of the year. Every new person who walked into the break room stopped, looked confused, and then my co-worker who sits right next to that would explain.

"That's a bad sign," I joked. "When your dot com stops providing amenities such as water, you know trouble's ahead." He snickered.

Neither of us are snickering now.

"I Have HR on the Phone with Me"

Thursday morning, my boss called as I was eating breakfast. We usually talk around noon, but he's been very busy lately.

"Hello," he said. "How are you doing? I have your HR representative here with me."

I knew what was coming. I felt a little numb and a little bit giddy. I pinched myself. Sometimes I have very vivid dreams. Once I dreamed that I'd been in a terrible accident and lost all of my teeth and broke all of my bones, and when I woke up I felt awful about how horrible my day would be. I winced as I raised my hand to my mouth and felt that all of my teeth were present and pristine. Of course, in another dream I won a huge lottery award and woke up planning a wonderful vacation only to realize that I hadn't actually purchased a ticket.

No matter. I was awake and this was real.

I work from home sometimes, so they told me to stay home today and finish up as much as I could. FedEx would arrive later with my severance packet, and I could swap any outstanding work equipment for my personal effects later. Good thing I tidied my desk just before leaving on Christmas break. I brought home a USB mouse a couple of years ago, but they don't really want that back, especially because the buttons stopped working on Wednesday. No joke.

I'd like to think I was professional and businesslike through the call, but mostly that was shock. I did ask about reassignment opportunities, knowing what the answer would be as the company has reassigned me before a couple of times. When they've decided they don't want you, they don't want you. Feel the shun.

"It's not personal," they assured me. "It has nothing to do with your job performance." I know they're required to say that, but I don't buy it. I worked my little tail off for that company. I'm good at my job. That's why I kept getting great performance reviews and bonuses. That's why they promoted me to a manager last year. Maybe it should have been personal. Maybe if it had been, they wouldn't have let me go.

I decided not to rush to my laptop and instead called my girlfriend, my brother, and my parents to tell them the bad news. They took it worse than I did just then. I was still in shock.

How was your Thursday?