10/30/01: PARTING PACKAGES

Today I went to the headquarters of my division at the 770 Broadway building instead of the 1515 office to meet with Carin in HR.  She handed me a folder and went over all of the sheets.  Lots of information about income continuance, benefits, etc.  I was pleased at how organized they were.  In previous rounds of layoffs we’ve had in our division, we were not as organized.  But this was a corporate-funded lay off, so the parent company was running the show.

Carin informed me, the official day of my separation would be tomorrow, October 31.  Halloween.  The Day of the Dead.  Whoever said September 11 killed irony was dead wrong.

Throughout this entire ordeal, no one other than Carin ever looked me in the eye and told me I was laid off.  Actually, no one other than Carin said anything to me at all.  My situation seemed inevitable, almost karmic.  How many people had I laid off or straight-out fired in my two years of managing the site production team?  At least I always tried to look them in the eye, not mince words about what was happening and thank them for their individual contributions to the company.  As if that made it an easier for them.  Still, you play the game long enough and eventually, everything comes around to you.  Though this is the third time I have been laid off in seven years, this is also the hardest time I’ve had dealing with it.  Perhaps I’m just getting older and I understand better what I am losing and what a pain in the ass it is to start all over.  

No doubt the surrounding circumstances are not making this easier.  It's hard to reconcile normal feelings of disappointment and anger when being laid off from a job I worked hard to create, while I'm still talking to neighbors about other neighbors who never came home from work on September 11.   The worst story I have heard in all of this tragedy, is about the group of young wives and their children having their regular morning playground time at the building next door, who all watched their husbands and Daddys killed.  I can only imagine what they would give for a simple lay-off.