When I Got Laid Off

On May 25, 2001, I got laid off. Tampa is a very small town when it comes to the IT industry, and when the industry goes through a major correction, as it did from late 2000 until early 2003, everyone suffers. A company that was located two floors down from my former company started work one day with 120 based at that location and ended the day with six. When the ax dropped on me, the severence pay was a pittance, but then again, to give us more, they'd have to lay off more people.

To be coarse about it, the experience sucked. It's a coarse word, but the experience isn't easy. After all, we're socialized in this country that a man is the provider for his family and the Bible even says that someone who doesn't provide for his family is worse than a non-believer.

To make a long story short, I was out of work for almost two years. We scraped by with whatever came my way in terms of work. I was paid a total of eight weeks of unemployment. We never defaulted on a bill. We still live in the house we had when I got laid off. When we exhausted COBRA, my wife took a job at Walgreen's for the health benefits. Although there are financial repercussions we still feel today, we made it through intact (and if you get laid off and keep your head, so will you).

But the experience was life-changing. As I feel like writing about it, I'll tell you how it changed my life. I can't say life is better because I got laid off, but I can say that I have a greater understanding about life.

The first misconception shattered by getting laid off was the idea that I'm in control. I've never been in control of much--and deep down, I always knew that. But the experience of being laid off laid waste to any fantasies of control I had. There's only one thing I can control, and that's how I react. I did a number of things wrong when I was laid off, but one thing I didn't do was give up. I controlled how hard I looked for work and the job I did when I found it. Within a month, I had temporary work. And I went from job to job until the time I was hired by my current employer in March 2003.

When I got the jobs, I worked hard at them. Because my continued employment was based on day-to-day productivity and quality, my work was never better than when I could go away at any time. I provided value to the people I worked for, and every contract I started got extended. I was a disaster in a lot of other areas, but that's an area in which I excelled. I had to. I had people counting on me. As the cliche goes, failure was not an option. And failure did not happen.

I controlled how hard I worked and how creative I was in finding and taking advantage of opportunities. I failed miserably at understanding the boundary of what I controlled and didn't.

More on that another time.