It's sort of funny (in a completely unfunny way) how utterly floored I was by the announcement. Because really I'd been expecting it on and off for at least the last 12 months. One would have to live under a rock to not at least consider it, and the rock would have to not get CNN or Fox News either, which just isn't going to happen. Everyone knows that the mortgage market is a mess. Up and down, back and forth, a million times a month. The first half of the year was great, like a boomtown really. I felt like I should be out on a river panning for gold, the number of files I was working and the job offers I was getting. But the changes kept coming, the rates kept swaying wildly, and the property values kept dropping. Plus, every month I would do the accounting for the office and see the huge drain on the profit margin that was my salary. I could see the river running low, nothing but rocks and pyrite, and the tumbleweeds blowing through the empty streets.
What my terrible metaphor is trying to say is that it shouldn't have been a shock.
But the hammer never fell, and I started taking a hard look at all the responsibilities I'd been steadily assuming in the office and I began to sincerely believe that things weren't as dire as I was thinking. Maybe this was the trade-off my boss was willing to make - a smaller profit for the reduced workload. By the time we hit July, I was straight up confident that I was actually secure in my job. I mean, at that point with the amount of work that I did there was no way I was dispensable (short of closing the office up entirely).
Now I read that last little parenthetical and absolutely cringe. How exactly did I get that myopic? There's missing the forest for the trees, and then there's taking a nap in your house while it's on fire because you're confident that you're the only one who knows where the fire extinguisher is.
Plus, my boss would have said something, right? RIGHT?
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A few fun facts on the closing of my office (I'm not bitter):
- Effective time/date of closing: The end of business on Monday
- The time/date I was notified of this fact: Monday at 4:53pm
- The resulting effective amount of notice I was given: 37 minutes
- Amount of severance I was going to get: $0 (zero dollars
- Amount of time I had worked there: 5 years, 2 months
- Total number of vacation days I had taken in all 5 years and 2 months: 7
- Number of jobs I had passed up in just the last 8 months: 6
(Definitely not bitter. But just for fun, let's keep going) - Most heartening thing I was told by my boss during the announcement: "I'm sure you'll be eligible for Unemployment. I mean, I used to hate the idea of the government giving people money for not doing anything, but I think you need to do what you need to do."
- Number of phone calls I received the following day from my boss with questions on how to work things in the office: 11
- Number of those phone calls where the answer to the question was "Did you turn the computer on?": 1
- The thing that pushed me closer to a psychotic break than I ever thought possible: "Oh, no. How do you turn on the computer?"
- (TOTALLY NOT BITTER)
The job search has begun in earnest. Luckily, even though it hit me like a sucker punch, I still had a good chunk of the money I'd be obsessively hoarding over the year in case something like this happened, so it's not like I'm out on the street. And guess what? Totally qualify for unemployment. Which does not mean I get government cheese like I though it did, and to which I was totally looking forward to. But I might get some money at some point. Woo, government.
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The point of this whole story: I've got some time on my hands, since I can only manage a maximum of 5 hours of job hunting and resume sending per day before my brain tries to forcibly escape my skull. So I'm going to try to re-open the blog.
We'll see.
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