New Day, New Way

So, three weeks ago, I got laid off from my job of nearly 5 years. (And last night, I had a dream where I was arguing with someone over how long it had been. I was getting really angry.)

The story, as it goes, is kind of hilarious. I started work that Monday morning like I have often, lately, working from home, logging into the servers at work and calling clients who needed help over the phone. One of the women at the office called and said I needed to schedule a new server install with Client R as it was in and paid for and such. A local Dell contractor was scheduled to come over to my house at 11 to fix a computer that I had tried to install at a client the week before, but was DOA. At almost precisely 11, the doorbell rang. I grabbed the PC, headed upstairs and…

Hey, the Dell guy kind of looks like my boss Craig.

Open the door.

Hey, it is Craig, what’s he…?

“I’m sorry Dave, but I have to lay you off.”

Well shit.

Surprising, but not unexpected, is how I’ve been putting it. Unrelated to the downturn in the economy, the company I worked for lost a rather lucrative exclusive sales contract in early 2008, which had brought us a pretty steady flow of new clients. Since then, management had cast about for other things to sell, but none of them really caught on, and we didn’t have the same foot-in-the-door that the big, lucrative contract had gotten us. So, on the one hand, we had become competitors with the people we had been working with, and on the other we were victims of our own success: we were so good at getting things to run smoothly that our clients could rarely justify signing service contracts with us when they only needed us a couple times a year at most.

So, on top of that came the recession, which in reality has had Michigan in its grip since 2000ish and only got worse with the worldwide downturn. All that conspired to make me “redundant.”

I’ve spent the last three weeks getting over it, consoled by my awesome friends and the deaths of many pixellated bad guys. Today I’m embarking on what may well be called the Indefinite Phase of unemployment. No idea when it will end, but for now it’s going to be marked by the company of my children on a regular basis. Which isn’t all bad.

It’s a good thing they’re cute, that’s all I’m saying.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.