unemployed

I write best when I'm filled with emotion, so I figured I may as well write something today. Yesterday, quite out of no where, I was laid off from my job. You may know me or you may not, but I can assure you this was not due to poor quality of work nor for hours not worked. Not only did I put in overtime almost every week, but I was also widely hailed as a great worker.

So what can you say when you do everything right and work really hard, love your job, love your company, help advertise your job to friends and family even when not on the clock, and then the company turns around and says, "You know what, we're gonna reorganize and find a way to do without you." There's nothing you can say. It's just a slap. A real slap in the face of an innocent man is what this is. I harbor no ill will toward my immediate manager(s) or coworkers, but whoever decided to do this without consulting those people as to who should go and who shouldn't made a gravely irresponsible decision.

Maybe they thought that if they gave the choice to the managers, that the managers would only spare their favorites and not the best workers. If that's the kind of faith you have in your managers, that's pretty sad.

But maybe it's another reasonless reason, that they just closed their eyes and like choosing a winner as randomly and fairly as possible, they pointed to numbers on a page instead of faces and people.

Either way, a great wrong has occurred here, and that's the part that hurts the most. Whether it was a mass layoff by random choice or by salary, they still made an absolutely 100% incorrect decision to remove me from their roster.

If you run a stop sign and an officer gives you a ticket, you can grumble, but you'll still know that you were in the wrong. If you park in an illegal space, you can protest as much as you want, the sign is still right there. But when you've done nothing wrong and prove yourself to be an outstanding worker, and a company still chooses others over you, the wrong is 100% with that company. And I believe that company will, as has happened before, be told of their error. Whether they choose to do the right thing and bring me back, as they did once before, is unknown. But they will be told of their error.

What will happen in my absence? Well, four people are left to do the work of 7 in my department. That's four people by the way, who even if you took away their Internet time and other break time, could still only do at maximum the work 5 did before. Not to mention the fact that my job was a department unto itself that no one else really knew. Which means very quickly, there will be 80 hours of work undone each week. Ridiculous.

Yet all of these words are the rants of someone looking backward with dismay and sadness and a little bit of anger. I need to regroup, I need to compose myself in a myriad of ways, and I need to walk forward confidently, knowing that though this particular company made the mistake of letting me go, there is a whole world out there waiting for me. It's a world of endless possibilities, and somewhere out there is a company who will appreciate me even more than I will appreciate it. I will make more money than I did before, I will meet new and interesting people and make new friends, and I will be happier than I was before.

I am unemployed...now. I will most likely be unemployed tomorrow. But somewhere in the near future is a better tomorrow for me and for my life. I will forgive those in the past who did this to me in error, and I will wish them well. But I will also prove my worth as an employee and as a person tenfold. I'm looking forward to it and I'm also just looking forward. Tomorrow, here I come!