My boss calls me into his office and asks me to shut the door. You always know to expect the worst when they ask you to close the freaking door. You can fill in the blanks. The reason was that they eliminated my position. I was told that the company was bleeding red ink. I wondered about the resumes that I saw on his desk but I didn’t say anything. I was offered a severance, it wasn’t my fault. I am getting unemplointment. I did not want to jinx it. I just signed the papers and cleaned out my office. I even agreed to help out for an hourly wage.
So here I am. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and I am the first from my company to get the boot.
(my wife tells me I should explain that I did not get fired because I don't know what I am doing. But I contend that anyone who has been employed and let go for "job elimination" will tell you that managers always believe that the less expensive guys will be able to do your job just fine. That is the justification for letting the most expensive and most experienced people go first.)
At first it looked as though It was going to be easy to find a job. There were tons of listings everywhere. So I cleaned up my resume and posed it on half a dozen sites. I got replies. I got an interview. Maybe things weren’t so bad after all.
But then the came the void. No call backs. No responses. And now the job ads are drying up. What’s a mother to do?
When the going gets tough, the tough start a business.
I put an ad on Craigslist today. Off the top of my head I called myself The Wizard of IT. Later after no one was calling I checked to see if anyone owned it – Someone else must have thought of the Wizard of IT before me, right?
Nope. So I snatched it up. Decided to make myself a brand. Create a blog. See if I can at least fill up my days of not getting a job with something interesting and informative.
So help me out. Ask me the hard questions? Did you know that Adobe Acrobat can suck up all of your company’s bandwidth under certain circumstances? Neither did I, but I found out – and if you are interested, I will tell you all about it.
