Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Grieving a Job
It sounds stupid, doesn't it, to be grieving a job? But I have been for over a year and a half. It's was two jobs back, and it was the longest I'd worked at any job in my career. I had planned to retire from that job in another ten years, but it wasn't to be.
It was 9:00 am on the first Monday in April 2004. I'd been at work for an hour and a half. My boss came by to take me to some meeting. I hadn't known anything about a meeting, but it wasn't that unusual for something to come up, so I tagged along.
I should have realized something was wrong when we went to an area of the building that was being remodeled and into an office where a senior member of HR was waiting. I should have realized, but I didn't.
I was no sooner in the door and in a chair when they dropped the bomb on me. The manager delivering the news was nervous. I was too stunned to react. I was literally stunned.
They told me about the severance package and what things could they get me from my cube? That brought me out of it a bit. I couldn't even go back to my cube to get my lunch? No, they'd get it for me. It was to save me the humiliation of seeing my now former co-workers, or so they said.
To show you how much shock I was in, I asked about the web server I administered. Did they need me to pass along any information to whoever would be taking it over?
No, they did not.
What about the other members of the Documentation Team? They weren't getting rid of all of us, were they?
They wouldn't answer any questions about who was staying and who was going.
It was a clean break. It felt like a bullet to the head. One minute you're there and the next minute you're gone. No transition. No goodbyes. Nothing. One minute you're starting a new work week; the next you're standing in the parking lot, alone wondering what to do with your day.
It was the most brutal thing I've ever experienced.
For weeks after it happened, I would wake up in the middle of the night thinking of something about the job I should tell my replacement only to realize that I had no replacement. They had taken the whole doc. team. We were not only expendable; we were not important enough to replace.
I still think about that day and that job. I never got to say goodbye to my coworkers. I have seen and commiserated with my fellow doc. team members, and we still keep in touch. But the others in the company, the department. It's as if I died that day. Only I'm still alive, and it's as if they died. Certainly the job died. And it's almost 20 months since it happened, and I still miss it. It's not as bad as in the beginning; time has a way of being kind about such things, I guess. But I still miss it.
That was when I decided that there was no such thing as a permanent job. It doesn't matter whether I'm working on contract or as an employee. I can be discharged at any time, without notice. (We never heard a word that layoffs were coming. They had good security on that one.)
