Discarded, downsized & done.

After being in the work world for 31 years, I have finally run out of pixie-dust and rainbow juice and have been laid off from my job. The only other similar event happened to me around 1985 when I was fired (unjustly) for something I didn't even do. That time I was unemployed for a whole weekend. I called up my prior boss to see if they needed anyone and he hired me back.

I may not be so lucky this time.

Now, before I go any further, let me say that I have no animosity toward my company, and certainly not to any of the people who work for it. The economy sucks, and to make things worse, the newspaper industry is in crisis-mode because of the internet and other challenges. Papers are shutting down all over the place, and workers are being laid off in record numbers. Personally, I think the printed newspaper will be a rarity in about ten or fifteen years.

Even so...I was surprised when my own company started bleeding people recently. I had thought the community newspaper industry had a bit more immunity against the crisis than the dailies do, and that we'd last a lot longer. I figured something like this might start happening to us in two or three years, but not now.

Obviously, I was wrong. I won't go into details about why or how it happened or who else was affected besides myself. Suffice to say, the company made a logical business decision, and I ended up as a redundancy. They're being very fair with me, and very kind, and I have nothing bad to say about them.

But still...it was a bad week. A really bad week. There's no way to make something like this not bad. I had some sense of what was coming before it happened, although I had no idea of the scope it would take. I knew it was likely that I'd be "downsized." So I had some time to prepare myself emotionally and managed to maintain my composure quite well while I got the news from the HR rep. That was over at about 1pm on Monday, and at that point, I needed to come home for a totally unrelated reason. But by the time I got here, I knew there was no way I could go back. I knew something dreadful was going to happen the next morning and I just couldn't face my staff and pretend that everything was normal, especially since there were already rumours flying around the office. I knew they'd be coming to me with questions, and I just couldn't lie to them. So I wrote in that I was taking the afternoon off, and just stayed home to think, plan and absorb what had happened to me.

I was keeping in fairly frequent contact with the office during that afternoon, and at one point, my boss asked me not to come in till 1pm the next day, as they were going to be doing the rest of the layoffs and staff meetings all through the morning on Tuesday. So Tuesday morning I let myself sleep in a little. Once I got up and started brooding about what was going on at work, I started getting more and more upset and the next thing I knew, I was in tears. It was awful. I felt like I was a mother being held back from protecting her kids from getting hurt or something. Of course there's nothing at all I could have done...except to be there with them. And that's what hurt so much. I couldn't be there with them. I was doing as I was ordered, and maybe what was best, but I still felt (and feel) very guilty.

When I arrived at the office at 1:00 the bloodshed was over. 20 per cent of us had been let go. The atmosphere was dismal. Upstairs in my department, I found three of my staff huddled in a corner cubicle with one of the sales co-ordinators, looking grim, not even saying anything to each other. I went over and joined them and we talked a while, cried a bit, comforted one another. The afternoon was pretty much a write-off, although we still had a paper to get out. Aside from one particularly difficult ad that had me wanting to scream and tear out my hair, it went pretty well. That was Tuesday.

On Wednesday, I came in, not really knowing what to expect. It was still pretty depressing, but people were behaving a little more normally than the day before. Several people approached me to express their disappointment that I was leaving. It was not unlike when my brother died and they came to give their condolences. I found myself constantly fighting back tears whenever anyone said anything sympathetic, so I finally just started telling them not say sympathetic stuff; that I appreciated their intentions, but it was too emotional for me to talk about it and I just wanted to try and keep things normal.

As that day wore on though, a curious thing happened to me. I began to feel kind of good. Upbeat, you know? The energy started to flow into me and after a while I found myself positively thrumming with optimism and excitement. So many people were saying such nice, supportive things to me. This is not going to be a disaster, I decided, it's going to be an opportunity. A challenge, sure, but not one I can't meet. And who knows where I might find myself in a month, or two months, or six months from now. I'm going to do everything I can to make sure it's a better place, with better money and more fulfilling work.

(Though, I don't think I'll ever find a job working with a better team than I have right now.)

My team. They're the best. I had to do something to help us all cheer up, spend some time together, talk about what was happening if we wanted. So I took them all to lunch on Thursday. It's our slow day and we took two hours. To heck with it, eh? This is special circumstances. We enjoyed a really nice relaxing lunch together, and I was glad to see that everyone seemed pretty upbeat. When we got back, I worked on another lunch...for the "Downsizers." I traded emails with them all and found out they all wanted to come. We settled on a date, time and venue and then I designed a cute little invitation I emailed out to all of them to make it official. I figured it would be good for those of us who are leaving to spend some time together away from the office. Do a bit of networking, lead-sharing, shoulder-sharing if necessary. The way everyone reacted to the idea, I think we all really need this. I'm looking forward to it. And my boss, the sweetheart, offered to pay for it all. I didn't even think to ask...he just offered out of the blue when I alerted him that the lot of us would be taking next Thursday afternoon off. :-)

Overall, I've found myself very unfocused this week. I tend to be a bit of a scatterbrain at the best of times, though never so much that it makes me any less productive. But not this week. Yikes. Couldn't focus well enough to do anything at all for more than a minute or so. For sure not well enough to do the final production on the magazine I'm working on. I tried and tried, but made very little progress. Too much on my mind. Stress and worry taking over. So many new things to think about and do and every time one of them comes into my mind I find myself stopping whatever I'm doing to go google something or send a note to someone (often to myself, as a reminder to do things I shouldn't do from work). So the magazine will just have to wait till Monday. I know I can finish it off, even with one solid day's work if necessary, in time for the press deadline on Wednesday. So I'm not concerned. I just couldn't do it this week. Almost felt like a stroke victim must feel trying to learn how to speak again.

Now here it is, Friday of one of the worst weeks of my life. The optimism and excitement are still there, but the energy has waned. I've pretty much crashed completely, both physically and emotionally. I'm just putting that down to it being the end of a long, very difficult work week. I'm glad it's the weekend. I have some nice things planned, and hopefully by Monday I'll be ready to tackle what's ahead.

So, what *is* ahead? Frankly, I have no idea. My company has offered me the services of a career counsellor for three months, and I've already had one meeting with him. I think it went pretty well. He's focusing on my resume to start with, and then I guess we'll figure out where to send it and how to handle any interviews I might get.

Plus, I've already started networking like a fiend. I read somewhere that most people do not find their jobs through the newspaper classifieds or through online job boards like Monster.com or workopolis. After having had a look at both of those, I can see why. For someone with my skill-set, at least, the job boards are almost useless. Sending out random resumes doesn't work that well either. Large signal to noise ratio, as it were. My job search will probably need to be much more targeted and individualized. So it's a good thing I have a coach on my side!

I've been calling and emailing everyone I can think of that I've ever worked with to let them know I'm on the job hunt and to please keep their ears open for any opportunities that might be suitable for me. I'm arranging for letters of reference from some heavy-hitters in my company to give some weight to my resume. I've started learning how to code HTML so I can create an online portfolio. I'm going to make personal calling cards with a mini-resume on the back to give out to people.

Frustratingly, I'll have to wait a bit before my resume has been spiffed-up by my career counsellor. But I'll be patient, as I know in my current situation, five minutes' wait can feel like an hour. A week won't kill me.

My hope and goal is to have another job by the end of October. Leave the current job on Oct. 30 and start a new one on Nov. 2. At the current pace, I doubt that will happen. So I'm also going to be open to enjoying a bit of unplanned time off. Time to visit, take a trip to Toronto to see my favourite author, Stephen King, on stage with David Cronenberg and George Strombolopolous(very excited about that). Lots of time to devote to finding the perfect job. Lots of time to write...if I can motivate myself to do it.

What I *don't* want is to get depressed. Depression will be a disaster and will badly hamper my efforts to find a new job. I need to be bright, energetic, confident and optimistic. So that's what I'm going to be.

Help me out with that, will ya?