Untethered

My office is moving to a new location.  So we all packed our stuff Thursday night and worked from home Friday—on Monday morning we’ll show up at our new home ten miles away and settle in.  I had often envisioned the scenarios in which I might pack up my little cardboard box with the photographs, mementos, plaques, coffee cups and pathetic spider plant that has somehow managed to stay alive all this time, not due to my own benign neglect but rather due to the efforts of our admin who has a kind heart.  The scenarios I usually imagined were of the pink slip and the take this job and shove it variety.  But in the end I packed my box in a much less dramatic exit, simply to move to a new town.

Still, it brought back some memories of the time I was laid off in November 1989, when I packed my little box in a shocked daze when I was booted out of my high tech job after 9 years.  Back then I hadn’t yet learned the signs and portents of impending layoff and so even though we’d had multiple painful rounds at my company and co-workers were dropping like flies all around me, I was still pretty stunned when it finally happened to me.  I was in good company—a large crowd of us headed over to the Outback Saloon and drank heavily, then I drove myself home, weeping all the way.  It was almost Christmas time, I was the sole support for my little family which consisted of one Mr. Mom and two kids aged 1 and 3, and I was driving home bearing the holiday tidings that I was out of work.

In the days that followed I made looking for work my job—spending 8 or more hours a day networking, fine-tuning various versions of my resume, writing cover letters, poring over want ads (we had want ads then—which were published in the newspaper), going to support group meetings, making cold calls, worrying.  Each morning I would walk the kids over to the pre-school a few blocks away and linger for the excellent coffee brewed by Laurie the pre-school teacher, delaying as long as possible the time when I would have to hunker down for the day to bang my head against the wall of unemployment.  One morning Laurie gently informed me that she had a job teaching pre-school and that it was really not okay for me to hang out trying to have conversation and cadging coffee refills while she was trying to teach the kids their colors and shapes.

After that cruel but necessary rejection I went straight to it at my computer each morning, doing everything in my imagination and power to find work, striving to quell my rising panic and endless fears:  we wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage we would end up penniless in the street my children would be dressed in rags we would wait in soup lines for our supper we would end up sleeping in the car.

After about 7 weeks, just as the severance was drying up like a Colorado creek in August and the paltry unemployment benefits were about to kick in, I was lucky enough to land an unadvertised job through a connection, and oh what a gigantic relief that was.  I remember those days often when I hear about the unemployment rates now, and I’m filled with a deep empathy for all those who are desperately seeking work.  Here’s hoping the economy turns around soon.  Meanwhile I am so lucky to remain employed, and so grateful.