On Monday, the 23rd of November, I got into work like any other regular day. I went to see my buddy J for a quick chat, but only got a ‘Sorry dude, now is not the time’. He seemed somewhat worried but I had no reason to suspect anything, so I carried on with my day. After an hour, curiosity finally got the better of me and I asked J over the office communicator whether he could tell me what was going on. His response was an unsettling ‘Dude, did you not hear the rumors? People are getting fired! I am deleting user accounts as we speak’.

My heart sank a little. I was called to a meeting at 11:30 that morning with no reason or subject given. But the whole team was called and they could not be firing the whole department or even a few of us in front of the rest, surely?

As we all got up to leave, the manager came over and asked me to follow her – to another meeting, on another floor. My heart stopped!

I was taken into a meeting with four other people, two from neighbouring departments and two from what seemed to be management, but I did not recognize them at all. My manager left.

‘As you know, the old CEO left a few months ago and the new CEO has been very interested in saving money. One of the areas he is looking into is personnel and your positions have been targeted for termination.’

That’s right, about a month before Christmas, I got fired!

‘We would like you to sign this document as proof that this meeting took place and also ask you to take this contract with you and return it to us signed before the following Monday. The contract is for your severance package and the agreement of your termination with the company.’

My contract will be up on December 31st. This is really nothing any of us saw coming.

One of the girls that was getting fired along with me piped up: ‘So what now, do we go back to work?’ Management replied: ‘No, we ask you to leave the building immediately, take what you can from your desk and call us for an appointment if there are any personal files on your computer, as you will likely not be able to log in by the time you get back to your desk.’

I remembered that J was deleting users at this point. I briefly wondered if he knew about me beforehand. Of course, later I checked with him and he said that he only got the user names the instant they got to the meeting. My name was on a little queue and he did not see it until I had left the building.

Right now there is a mad rush, looking for work, trying to figure things out, but to be honest, I can’t see anything happening until after the New Year. Everyone is worrying too much about Christmas and their parties to even think about employing new folks.

So, I apply and wait. I started a course on JavaScript (part of web design) which should be a good stepping stone into pastures new.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 12:14 am and is filed under Life Pill. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.