Moving On: A Tale of Two Layoffs

This stern warning stands above one of the doors at the place I used to work. On July 28th, I turned in my employee badge and parking pass and this old sign took on a much more literal meaning. A couple days ago my severance check arrived in the mail, which makes my layoff complete.

I've only been laid off one other time, back in 2001 at the outwhooshing of whatever was inside what we've come to call the Dot-Com Bubble. Everything about that layoff was very dramatic. For one thing, I wasn't expecting to get laid off. I was the only person doing my job, after all. For another thing, I'd just arrived back in town after driving for almost 48 hours from San Francisco to Denver and back (a long and essentially pointless story), so I was sleep deprived and road loopy. I packed up my desk and went for a long boozy lunch with some co-workers at the Holding Company (somewhere there's a polaroid of me at the table wearing a big Dr. Seuss hat). That was followed by a nap and then more drinking that evening in the Financial District with the laid off contingent and sympathetic still-employeds. I awoke the next day with a huge hangover, few prospects and little motivation to look for any. It would be months before I worked at anything but freelance gigs. In my defense, I was also very occupied with getting the woman who is now my wife to move back to California from Tennesee (a long and profoundly essential story).

This time around, I saw the layoff coming and welcomed it like a dry and weary land (see KC Star, summer 2003, ad nauseum) welcomes rain. Instead of giving me my papers and showing me the door like civilized people, my most recent employer told me that I'd have to work through a 60-day transition period before the gift of severance would descend. Sixty days of counterproductive cubicle purgatory followed. Whatever. When the 60 days was up, I signed the necessary papers and headed over to my other part-time job (which I had before I even before I started the full time job in July 2005). That evening I had a drink and dinner with my wife at home. I've since found full-time work that I really enjoy and started doing it (another long story that's just begun).

This is the point where a writer worth his This American Life salt wraps things up in a neat little package: "I guess it all comes down to this..." You know the drill. Maybe something poetic: "Two layoffs, one lightning, the other a long twilight..."

I'll give it some thought. In the meantime, there's work to do.