The Economic Downturn Hits Home

At lunch today, I had it all planned out: I was going to work on a garden blog for tonight.

But at 4:30, I overheard my coworker crying. She wailed that she had been “fired.”

Oh. Lay-offs have come home to my world. She wasn’t fired: I knew that. She was laid off. But she is a single woman living hand-to-mouth and her car was sitting in the parking lot with a slow leak in one tire that needed to be pumped up before she tried to drive home.And that tire is past “legal.”

I’ve given a little thought to lay offs of late, mostly because I wasn’t sure how my company was going to go on this issue: would I be laid off first because I moved to the corporate office in 2006? Or would my coworker be laid off first because I was actually hired a few months before her (even though I worked in a branch and not at the corporate office)? I knew a lay off was in the offing.

I just didn’t know who.

So I made a few mental contingent plans. How would I react? What would my first reaction be? What would I say? What would I do in the first week?

Apparently, my coworker had not considered any of those options because she pretty much lost it – and her anguish was directed at me. I understand: I am not blaming her here. She is single. She lives hand-to-mouth. Pay check to pay check. There’s very rarely any room to juggle in her budget.

I am married. We live pay check to pay check, but we have wiggle room (I won’t tell you how long that took us to accomplish). She has no idea where I have been or how poor I have been (we lived in a church once when we were homeless: Don, myself, Arwen & Levi). I don’t talk about the hard times. There is nothing to be gained by focusing on those days except experience.

I wanted to be able to comfort my coworker, but I could tell from the anguished statements coming from her cubicle that I was the Last Person On Earth that she wanted to see. “I don’t have a husband…” “What am I going to do…” “I don’t have a f—ing husband…” Actually, the F-Word was repeated a lot.

I ended up sneaking out to make the deposit. I felt horrid, like some sort of coward. But everyone else was making sure I got out the door without a confrontation: “go-go-go!” How terribly sad is that?

I came home and told Don about it and he immediately surmised the situation: “She went ‘postal’?”

Yeah.

I had already planned out how I would respond if it was me that got laid off. Cry a little, hug a lot, say good-bye, pack up my desk and move on. Sadly, it wasn;t me who got the pink slip. Or maybe – thankfully – it wasn’t me. All I know is there is some sort of Plan. I hated the idea of that Plan when I was in my deepest and darkest moment, but it was also the hope of that Plan that kept me plugging forward and not commiting suicide on the spot.

There’s a Plan. There’s an Ending. There has to be a way out of here  (said the Joker to the Thief – thank you Bob Dylan. Thank you Jimi Hendrix.)

Even if there isn’t a Plan, you still have a choice in how you react. Or respond. You have cancer? My friend, Ellen suggested we have a contest to name her tumors. My friend, Jodi, suggests (a la Mark Twain) that we eat one live toad in the morning (nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day). You get laid off? Don’t blame the married dual-income coworker next to you who just had the fortune (or misfortune) to get hired three months before you did. She didn’t see this coming any better than you did.

Anyway, there really is not a point to this blog except that I will get up in the morning tomorrow and go to work. And my coworker won’t. And I really hope she finds a job soon. And I really did not see this coming any more than she did.

I will miss her a lot.