Greetings. I received a call at home a couple of days ago from the CEO of my company, letting me know that everyone in the assistive technology training department of the company was being laid off. There are a lot of thing that I could and might write here, but mainly I wanted to let the readers of this blog know.
The past 2 days have felt like watching a disaster on TV: at some point you want to turn away and do other things, but you can't help going back to it or talking about it. Yesterday was the last day of work for many of us, there were 9 people including me, and that was hard. It would have been easy for me to think that it was no big deal, since from the time I heard on Wednesday afternoon to when I went to work yesterday morning, I was by myself. However, when I went to work and talked with my coworkers, and saw that they were sober and grim about what had happened, that made everything all the more real. I mean, the director was wearing sunglasses, not to look cool, but to hide the red eyes she had from crying much of the previous night.
I've got a job lead I'm working on at the state training center at Austin, basically doing the same thing I was doing, being a adaptive technology instructor, but other than that, I'm not sure what I will do. I've got to make some calls in a little while to cut down some of the monthly expenses I have, like loan payments or payments on equipment, down to their minimum to conserve my money. I will be getting severence pay which will help, hopefully it will last through the end of the year.
I'm starting to come out of my sadness, since the same emotions have been worked through for 2 days, however whenever I think about being let go; of not going to work next Tuesday and seeing some of the people; it all comes back to me. As I say, I might write on this blog of my experiences and possibly some of the things leading up to the lay off, but we'll see. If anything, I can now write of my job search. I've been searching for a job before now, but I was afraid to write of it, afraid that someone from work would read it and I'd get in trouble. But, I guess that I don't have to worry about that anymore.
Two good things that happened yesterday were going out to lunch with Brad, one of my coworkers, and talking with my good friend Tim last night. In true lay off fashion, Brad and I went to Hooters for lunch, and ended up talking for quite some time after we had finished eating. That was good, not only because it was bonding time with a coworker, but we got some of the complaining of what happened and the events leading up to it, out of our systems. And, last night with Tim was good since he helped me work through some of the minor decisions, let me cry, and mainly listened and fulfilled the role of a good, close friend. One of the hardest things that I might very well have to deal with in the immediate future, is letting people buy things for me. I'm one to pay my own way as much as possible, since in growing up and as a young adult, I had people try to buy things for me because they felt sorry for me. I'm not saying that this will happen a lot or even that it will, but this is one of the struggles I'm already going through.
That's about all for now. Until we talk next, this is the sober, jobless Wayne, signing off.
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