Laid Off

Today I was laid off, all of my speculation and weariness rewarded with the sinking stone of finality stemming from a demise of very awkward precision. With the stroke of a pen and a decision, controversial yet understandable from the viewpoint of the maker, my entire department was excised from the company; eliminated with no prior notice nor whiff of rumor. How did we miss that?

There is no prior notice of upheaval if there is no picking and choosing to be made; everybody goes and nobody knows. I suppose it is easier that way, McCain-style as it were, lacking finesse as reported during the debates. McCain was going to take a "hatchet to the federal budget" but Obama was going to "wield a scalpel" expertly removing the tumor of governmental budgetary waste like a surgeon.

Over the last month and a half, layoffs have taken center stage. So devastating an animal, so despondent a beast. This morning on the way to work on-time for a change, after utilizing the barter arrangement with our neighbors down the street for the occasional morning school bus duty (our school bus comes at 8:45 or so making me 5-10 minutes late to work on those days when my husband does not work from home) I turned up NPR, as usual, for the morning news.

I only listen to NPR/public radio in the car, news or classical music is all I need and my children will refer to this when they are grown as "one of mom's quirky habits." I have plenty, of which I am very proud, since many of them actually help my kids to get smarter, despite themselves; they may beg to differ. Anyhow, there was news of Dow Chemical's 11% workforce reduction, 5000 full-time and 6000 contractor positions plus the shuttering of 20 plants, that made me realize I had both hands on the steering wheel and I was thanking my lucky stars that I still had a job...until I arrived and found out some 15 minutes later that I no longer had a job.

I hate the whole stealth HR thing: swooping in, accompanying you to an office or conference room, rattling some prepared speech about severance - yadda yadda - the turning in of your badge, being accompanied back to your desk for your things and you are gone. No time to say goodbye, no time to clear the cookies from your workstation and definitely no time to go to the toilet. Though they are sorry and sad and it is not a performance issue, and in my case the severance was generous for my short tenure, you still are summarily dismissed like a leper.

Thankfully, a little loitering in the parking lot revealed the wicked truth, that it was all of us, not some of us, and some went home sadly, alone. I chose to go to the diner with some of my compatriots to commiserate and it was good. I hadn't had time for my usual coffee and oatmeal as I was motivated to dash out some emails before my morning meeting ritual began. Some coffee and a bagel was all I could stomach though; that same old wretched feeling of loss, perhaps abandonment, confounding me even though I felt armed with enough intellectual preparation.

A colleague of mine said, "maybe the Lord was telling her to stay home with her children" and how she was sad to have to let go her babysitter. It dawned on me that I was in the same boat having to release my afternoon care-giver, the person who had made my 9-5 so bearable, so seamless. We concluded that for every mother that was laid off, there was a caregiver who also lost a job and that is a sad reality of all of this mess, collateral damage as it were and an important point that is usually lost in the reporting shuffle.

Alas, I really liked this job, all of the pieces were right. May I find another soon enough that I might not sweat, at least not too long to sow seeds of regret.