The Layoff

For the moment (literally, the moment) things with Sara's mother in Vermont are stable. She's at her home, attended by Sara's sister and regular visiting nurses. We're trying to gauge the best time to fly East; right now there'd be nowhere for us to stay, but the phone could ring at any point and we could be off. That story too has its miasma of chaos, but this morning I can afford to put it on hold for a minute and write about the layoff.

"Fight for my job/Hate it anyway," sings Anne McCue. I've been laid off from companies before--in fact it happened to me as recently as 2008 (though I'd held THAT job for 14 years)--and it always carries the mingled taste of liberation and panic. This last company, which I will fictionally call C3PO Inc., for its tendency to fall apart and propensity for clueless speech and behavior, was, let's say it bluntly, a terrible place to work. Technical writers are always to a certain extent exiles in a foreign land, hired to carry the English language into the domain of technogeekery, but nowhere have I felt that torch sputter lower in the feeble oxygen at the back of the cave than at C3PO. This company had no idea how to use me. Well, heck, they barely knew how to use their assemblers and engineers, as the assemblers and engineers told me themselves. (I tend to get along with technogeeks, hence my career as a technical writer, and with underpaid workers, hence my socialist outlook.) Having a writer on staff was about as comprehensible to them as having a circus rider.

It was a small company, owned by the typical genius Guy Who Knows Everything, grown to the typical stage where he can no longer manage everything himself but doesn't know it. I could go on and indulge in character sketches...but the fiction might rub riskily thin. And I guess I'm trying to avoid talking about The Layoff.

They let me put in a ferocious last month in the rush period, where I worked two weekends (all while Sara's mother is dying in Vermont), down to the final day, where I worked intensely and got the big project finished. Just before 6:00, when I normally leave, came the summons from my boss, the closed door in her office, she and another company higher-up in attendance. The sad, serious faces. "We're having layoffs...and we have to let you go." "I need your key-card." "I'll see if I can find a cardboard box for your personal things, and then I'll escort you out."

I'd had a million hints. I'd even started sending out resumes a few months before. But I swear it hit me like a car doing 70 coming out of a footpath in the woods. I stood in a daze; I could barely speak; I had no idea how I was going to go home and tell Sara, in the final crisis of her mom. I did mention that situation to the bosses, and I was at least able to enjoy seeing the sick guilt on the higher-up's face (my own boss KNEW of the situation, damn her). Then came the last walk out the front door, which I'd often dreamed of, and the strangeness of driving that familiar hated commute for the last time.

"Fight for my job/Hate it anyway..."

The scene at home I won't describe, except to say that Sara is fabulous.

Walking around town after being laid off, the last few days, I'm reminded of Solzhenitsyn's description of arrest. You're in your usual clothes, walking down your usual street, but suddenly you no longer belong to that world. You're as if in a different dimension. You can go to the grocery store, and spend money like everyone else...but theirs is renewable and yours isn't. The other shoppers don't see the difference--yet--so you can fool them, but eventually the divide will become known. You're not in their world. And even as you stand among them, you're embarked, to continue the Solzhenitsyn theme, on a dark train into the fathomless gulag of the unemployed, with no advance knowledge of your final destination, only a sense of remoteness and cold.

(My socialist outlook, by the way, holds not the slightest brief for Stalin or his Ism. Important to say that).

So the object here is to somehow be plucked from the crowd boarding the train--to be hired at a new job quick--to have someone run from the station crying, "Wait! There's been a mistake with that one." So I'm feverishly jobhunting, and Sara probably would be too, except--at any moment we'll have be leaving for maybe two weeks on the East Coast.

Timing?