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New York, 1:59 PM
Wed Dec 9
47 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/30/08
11/24/08
Except my boss didn't know AB was firing me because they fired her too.
10/30/08
I've always been really lucky with jobs - never been fired or laid off (knock wood) - and I wouldn't know what to even do if I lost mine. The economy is so scary that it's increasingly a reality.
10/29/08
10/29/08
10/29/08
1st layoff- they told everyone there would be lay-offs, then had everyone in their cubicles waiting for the boss to go out and select the unlucky.
2nd layoff- They got everyone in the conference room and put severance letters on the chairs.
3rd layoff- They sent everyone to two different conference rooms, the good one and the bad one.
This worked well so they used it twice more.
10/29/08
The Marketing chick, who was BFF with the HR chick, went barging into her office to ask what it was all about. HR chick told her. That left me with my finger up my nose.
I stood outside HR chick's office while everyone snickered (who knew there were layoffs coming?!!) at me like I was the kid who got called to the office.
It sucked major ass. I cried as I cleaned out my desk. So did my friends. The next day, I heard they called everyone into the conference room to discuss it.
Then they just started laying off everyone.
10/29/08
In 2004 I worked at the corporate headquarters for the nation's largest retailer of remote-controlled boats and LED lights... that's right, RADIO SHACK! That year, they had just demolished historic public housing buildings and displaced about 120 families so they could have a very fancy $250,000,000 38-acre riverfront campus, and about four months in at the new digs, the DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING, the entire Packaging Design department (the next time you buy a coaxial cable and ponder about who chose the font and color scheme, these are the folks!) got called in to a meeting by the future CEO himself to announce that out of the sixty or so people, only seven jobs will remain intact and everyone else can re-apply to a company they were outsourcing all the design gigs to. I was relatively new to the company, so I didn't care and was actually excited to get a severance check for my small amount of service, but there were dudes there who have been there like 30+ years since the days of Tandy Products pumping out reel-to-reels and TRS-80s and are now facing for the first time in their lives the reality of having to cut their pony tails etc and go suck ass at an interview hoping to score a job elsewhere. Happy Holidays!
Allthewhile, every week there'd be a new corporate art piece hanging off the grand hall ceilings that undoubtedly cost six figures. (My favorite one is what I call BatteryHenge, eight oversized 9-volt Radio Shack batteries arranged in a circle outside in a garden! --
Art!) But it is not my policy to feel beaten and not scavenge for the silver lining, and so as a consolation for them laying us off right during the holiday season, they paid us until the end of the year to use our desks, phones, email, and unbelievably superbad Xerox Phaser 7700 color printer to make résumés and look for other jobs. A whole month of getting paid to IRC and play wordsandwich.com, it really wasn't so bad afterall, and I used those contacts to start my own web development firm right after the holidays. I'm just sad for the cool oldschool dudes who weren't so lucky.
The true hilarity, though, came when only months later the Fort Worth Star-Telegram did their homework and found that the guy who laid us off, Dave Edmonson, lied on his résumé saying he got a degree from a school he only completed two semesters at. ([www.foxnews.com]) Karma is a bitch.
10/30/08
10/30/08
10/29/08
I have the distinction of making the HR woman feel absolutely horrible about letting me go by putting on the bravest face and handling the situation as positively as anyone could have ever expected.
She openly cried as she explained the severance package.
10/29/08
I had an assistant that I thought was being groomed to take my old position sort of. He would be doing all the network support and PC upkeep. (Not run the department as it was being phased out) They wanted me to train him to "work during the day as I was only there at night". Well I had a very well informed grape vine that had warned me of my impending separation from the job.
I was pulled into a meeting on a thursday night and asked how my assistant was coming. I told them "He is on track and doing great". They asked how I felt about the situation and I told them that after I was gone I felt things would be great with him as he follows through and knows his job.
They fired him friday morning. I was kept on for several weeks and then told that after the new year I would have to bill them as an independent business. I knew how they liked to not pay bills so that wasnt an option.
They made an employee the network admin who thinks passwords are irritating and who gave his admin password to students "so they could do their projects in the textbook"... Their servers have pretty much failed and the last few folks I knew there are leaving from frustration.
I to this day dont know why they fired him.
V
10/29/08
10/29/08
10/30/08
10/29/08
Of course I was nearly bawling at my interview and was very evasive so I really screwed it up.
(I was laid off only 2 months after a funeral of a very close relative of mine. I was fired 10 months after I started. I scored a signing bonus, an exceptional 3-month written review and a good 6-month review. WHEN I saw that my yearly review was not on its way but other team members got theirs, I knew something was coming. It sucks to have a good boss, have them leave and then get a boss that hates you.)
One consolation was that my coworker quit only two weeks after I got fired and if the co. knew that was coming maybe they would keep me around a little longer.
The real fun after getting laid off is everyone treating you like a pariah. For some reason, many seem to have the sneaking suspicion you did something X-rated or illegal in order to have gotten fired so they dissociated from you. (One comment from HR when I was signing the severance form was that I shouldn't have downloaded iTunes. Oh well, IT person told me it was okay so there was another person not to trust.)
I knew that the people who didn't reply to my emails or ask how I was doing never really cared for me in the first place. At least two silent people were extremely nice to my face pre-layoff so I have to say that it came as a complete shock not to hear from them again. Now I read their previously nice statements as forced. They were humoring me.
I found a job within two months and at my current job I make much more than I did when I got fired but my psyche is still bruised.
10/30/08
10/29/08
10/29/08
10/29/08
10/29/08
10/29/08
10/29/08
That was a really long paragraph to say I like 'em both.
10/29/08
10/29/08
It just sounds so satisfying.
10/29/08