Well, it's official.
Annabelle will not be coming back to work at Titanic Cruises. The softie in me (who has only recently begun loosening his stranglehold on my emotional controls and handing them over periodically to the somewhat more reckless hard-ass in me) feels really bad for her. Not bad enough that I didn't gaffle her pens and Kleenex this morning when I got to work, but I've got a cold and people keep stealing my writing utensils, yo. Anyway, I know what it's like to get fired for the new year. At the same time, I have to confess that she never quite fit in around here. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, mind you.
Of course, I'm a little nervous about it all. See, Annabelle has an apartment just down the street from the office here. I'm not sure what I'm particularly worried about, though. I mean, unless she decides to take a dip in the harbor, or an extremely bitter walk down memory lane, I'm not likely to run into her for a really awkward reunion while I'm down here. Of course, there's always the chance she'll come busting in here with a service revolver and start shooting the place up, but it's a little ridiculous to think that proximity increases the chances of that. Anyone so disgruntled that they think committing a few bloody homicides is their only avenue of recourse probably wouldn't be deterred from their mission of death by the fact that they might have to call a cab to get down to the office. Like she'd be sitting around going, "Gee, I'd love to kill them all, but I really don't feel like taking the bus."
It must be a bad time of year for employment. It was one year ago today that my official employment at Heartless Insurance, Ltd, came to an untimely end. I'd been working there about five months and loved my job almost as much as I love getting shot in the face. Which is to say, not very much. However, the pay was really good for a single guy in Chicago, the building was in a great location, and I enjoyed having business cards and the whole lot of it. Also, I had the Really Nice Stapler that everyone kept trying to steal from me, because theirs all sucked. Nyah nyah!
At the same time, May Day was just striking out on her own here in sunny LA. In fact, she'd only just started on the job she recently lost, and every time we spoke she kept telling me I ought to chuck it all and move out west with her. As the Heartless Insurance rumor mill was spinning with news of potential lay-offs, I half-jokingly told her that if I fell victim to the cuts, I would. One month later...
But I'm getting ahead of myself. See, they planned all the personnel cuts for the weeks immediately preceeding Christmas, because the company was run by THE DEVIL HIMSELF, and they decided to take care of all the individual meetings on our floor. Not comforting. Add to that the fact that as our department's entire function was to increase the staff, we were beginning to feel like a bunch of Atari salesmen the day after Nintendo hit the shelves.
Anyway, the day before the initial cuts, Big Boss Lady Colleen came up to me and said, "I'm going to need you to help me with something tomorrow." So my heart stops beating as I wait for her tell me that the 'something' is packing up all my shit and tossing me out on my can. As it turns out, she needed me to sit at the front desk and direct people to the conference rooms. Gulp.
Talk about an uncomfortable afternoon. How do you look two hundred people in the eye, knowing that you're effectively showing them the way to Gallows Hill? I seriously considered putting a paper bag over my head so they couldn't tell who I was, and my friend Holly and I joked about diving under our desks whenever a conference room opened in order to avoid the spray of bullets.
Plus, people would come up to me saying things like, "Uh...yeah, I'm, uh...participating in the restructuring program," which is like being sent to the Chair and telling everyone you're 'taking part in a state-sponsored exercise to increase revenues for the local electric company'. Restructuring program, my ass.
A couple weeks later, after the new year, I was sitting at my desk when my pal Irene stomped down the row, flopped into her chair and announced, "Well, I'm gone. I just got fired." I was shocked, because Irene was a truly hard worker and one of the most delightful people to be around. Plus she was my immediate superior. Uh oh. Ten minutes later, my Unit Manager, whom I called The Klingon, since she rode my ass like a hemmerhoid and micromanaged me to within an inch of my life, came up to me all, "Hey, I just need to talk to you for a moment in this conference room over here..." and I could totally see the axe she was holding behind her back.
I remember next to nothing about that meeting except the words "we're going to have to let you go," as if I was really champing at the bit to get out of there and they were doing me a favor. So I went back to my cubicle and Irene and I laughed it up for a while to hide the pain, and then my other immediate superior, Colleen 2.0, came up to tell us she'd been shitcanned too. So all three of us laughed uproariously until The Klingon came by to tell us we had about ten minutes to pack our shit and hit the bricks before they called security.
So I used those ten precious minutes to rack up the Heartless Insurance phone bill by calling May Day to tell her fate had sided with her on the issue of my move to California, and then my parents, then I hid some files, stuffed the Really Nice Stapler in my bag, and walked out without looking back. Of course I had to run the Gauntlet of Sympathy on my way to the elevator -- Holly wanted to do lunch, Amy wanted to get together for drinks, you know, sometime, Cindy preached to me about the silver lining, and Marcia obliviously waved goodbye as she gabbed to her daughter on the phone -- but the truth is I felt completely debased.
I mean, I didn't get fired due to incompetance or gross negligence or improper behavior or anything, but all these employed people feeling effusively sorry for me and my brand new No Job were shitting all over my tattered pride. I appreciated the sentiment, but I just wanted to get the hell out of there and get on with being a shiftless bum.
On the upside, it wasn't a total loss. I got a seriously cherry severence package that allowed me to take a vacation and enjoy what I liked to call 'Paid Time Off' before having to search for a new vocation. Plus I got this bitchin' stapler out of the deal. I was optimistic about the future, and knowing that my parents were more than willing to let me move back in and live off the fat of the land (ie - take up residence in my old bedroom and not pay rent) made facing life a little easier. Of course, I was determined to go through it on my own.
I later found out they got rid of The Klingon as well my arch-enemy from the office, Athena, so I can't complain too much. Yes, I'm petty like that.
Fast forward one year, and I'm in LA. Okay, so I'm still just an underpaid temp, but let's call this a transitionary period. I don't miss Heartless Insurance, Ltd. one iota, though, and now I know I can weather the storm of unemployment and take care of myself. I won't say getting fired was a good experience, but I think it made me stronger. And I can staple like a pro.