by Tim Michaels
Gordo reluctantly told me I was indeed eligible for the severance package, and if I took it, I would get one and a half weeks of severance for each year worked. In my case that amounted to 6 weeks pay. In addition, I would get paid for the week of vacation from the previous year that I hadn’t used up, as well as the three weeks of vacation I had received for this year but hadn’t spent either. Additionally, if I took the severance package I would still be awarded the stock options I was scheduled to receive, though they would be pro-rated.
All told, according to Gordo the severance amounted to about ten weeks of my current salary. I quickly did the math and realized that it would take three and a half months to earn that amount at the new, lower rate of pay. Put another way, if I found a job within three and a half months time, I would be financially better off leaving now rather than taking the lower-paying position. And that, of course, didn’t account for the reduction in future earning potential that would come from accepting a demotion.
Gordo also told me the terms of the severance package might require me to stay on for up to 30 days training a replacement, depending on whether Barney Talbot, my director, felt it necessary. If I did need to train a replacement, I would remain at my old salary during that time. Then I asked him who I should formally notify of my decision to accept or reject the severance letter. Gordo said I could simply inform Talbot, and Talbot would take care of it. I was starting to sense that the process, at least as it involved me, put a little too much faith in the hands of someone who wasn’t very bright. Not that I had any choice in the matter.
H and I discussed what to do all weekend. We went back and forth on accepting or rejecting the offer. It wasn’t an easy decision but we decided leaving the company was the best option. On Sunday I went to the office with a box and cleared out all my personal items. It was all trivial stuff. The only thing I really cared about was a pencil sketch H had made of the three of us walking across a footbridge on Jeremy’s first birthday. I folded up the sketch and put it in my wallet.
Monday morning I walked into the office and turned in the slip accepting the severance offer to Barney Talbot. Talbot seemed genuinely surprised. He blinked twice, considering what then to do next. Then he hunted through a binder full of envelopes until he found one with my name on it and then he handed it to me. After that, he awkwardly shook my hand and wished me luck.
I walked out without opening my envelope. For good measure, I e-mailed Gordo and called him to confirm that I was taking the severance. Not surprisingly, I only got Gordo’s voicemail.
After that, I opened up the envelope Talbot had handed me. Inside was a letter from HR. The letter informed me that I would be considered an employee of the company until I had a severance meeting with HR. The date of the severance meeting would be scheduled within a few days and I would be informed of when I had to come in at that time.
I walked back to Talbot’s office and asked him if the letter meant I had to stick around.
“No. You’re free to go any time. But if we need you, you might have to come in now and again. But just through the end of the month,” Talbot said.
I thanked him. Once again, he blinked twice, awkwardly shook my hand and wished me luck.
Then I walked through the cubicles saying goodbye to people. As I walked past his desk, Barry O’Connor flipped me the bird. I gave him a broad smile. He called me an asshole. I broadened the smile.
Ten minutes later, I grabbed my bag and headed for the door. On the way to the stairs, I ran into Barney Talbot. For the third time, he blinked twice, awkwardly shook my hand and wished me luck.
Ten minutes after that I was in my car driving home. I was now unemployed, or would be once I went through the severance interview.
Chapter 4. Imagine a Stable Necrosis
Being unemployed is a tough thing in America. Our identities are tied in to our jobs. I’ve seen studies that equate a job loss with the death of a family member. In my case, it wasn’t that bad – I know now what it feels like to lose my wife and son, and the job loss, bad as it was, wasn’t even in the same ballpark. Still, it did feel like a very strong kick in the gut.
When I walked in the door, I smiled wanly. H walked over and gave me a hug. Then she showed me the new “M & O Job Loss” folder in the file cabinet. H was always organized that way. One of her favorite toys was a label-maker, and everything in the file cabinet was neatly labeled. The offer letter was already sitting in the file. I placed a few odds and ends, mostly phone numbers of various departments and printouts of correspondence in the file as well.
Then I unpacked my briefcase and pulled everything out. I had a made a point of not bringing back anything owned or paid for by M &O, not even my business cards. I wouldn’t need them in any case. After that, I was left with an empty feeling, as if there was something I was supposed to be doing and I wasn’t getting to it. I realized I was a bit too depressed to get anything done so I offered to take Jeremy out of H’s hair.
Jeremy and I went to Portage Lake, an eminently forgettable body of water northwest of Canton. It does have a small beach area. On weekends in the summer, when the water is warm, the beach fills up with families that have young children. The young children, in turn, contribute some additional warmth and coloration to the water at the beach end of the lake.
On a Monday afternoon the lake was, predictably, empty. I held Jeremy’s hand and we toddled forward on the muddy sand. This was only Jeremy’s second trip to the lake, and as much as he liked baths, he had gotten very nervous when he got his first glimpse of a large body of water. This time around he was still nervous, and he didn’t have the reassurance of seeing a bunch of other children barely older than he was splashing around happily. Holding hands, we cautiously approached the water and then spent about fifteen minutes in water up Jeremy’s belly. After a while, Jeremy forgot he was afraid and started playing. He was reassured by being with his Daddy.
Unfortunately, I had nobody to give me reassurance. I was, frankly, scared. I was scared I wouldn’t find a job, scared we’d run out of money, scared I’d failed myself, my wife and my son. But I smiled at Jeremy and didn’t let it show.
The next morning, I started work on my new resume. And then, at 9:15, I got a call from Barry O’Connor. He needed me in the office.
I drove over to the M & O building, arriving at 10:30. It was three and a half hours after I would normally have started my day. My desk was exactly as I had left it the day before, except that the chair had been swapped out for one that was clearly broken. I went looking for Barry O’Connor.
O’Connor was on the phone. He saw me, put his hand over the speaker, and said, “I’ll be with you in a few, hot shot.”
I gestured toward my cube, and then walked away.
I sat down in the broken chair. It tilted sideways and backwards. Precariously perched, I flipped on my laptop. Amazingly enough, my login ID and password were no longer valid. I was shocked that any branch of the company, much less the IT department could move that quickly.
I slid back from the laptop and the seat of the chair snapped off, landing me on the floor. Fortunately, I didn’t hurt anything, but I did feel embarrassed. Normally I would have said something to one of the secretaries, which would have resulted in a new chair, but it didn’t seem worth the hassle. I didn’t expect to be there much longer.
So I stood up, and leaned against my desk. Frankly, I was bored. I was also feeling anxious – I knew I should be working on my resume. My mind began wandering. A few people had nodded at me as I walked in but nobody had said anything. I wondered whether I was officially a pariah and if anybody would dare talk to me.
After ten or fifteen minutes, I leaned myself away from the desk and into a fully upright position. I then walked over to O’Connor’s desk. He wasn’t there.
I walked back to my desk. For the next half hour or so I cleaned scraps
of food from the crevasses in my laptop’s keyboard with a piece of cardboard, a tack, and paper clip. Every so often I had to flip the laptop over and shake it to dislodge a particular stubborn particle. Then I pulled out my cell phone and checked my personal e-mail. Nothing had come in. I would have surfed the net but the battery on my cell phone tended to die quickly when I did that and I didn’t bring my charger. I hadn’t anticipated being at the office that long with nothing to do.
Eventually I went to cafeteria to get lunch. Nobody talked to me. A few people smiled at me and waved, but it clearly wasn’t healthy to be seen talking with someone who taken a severance package. I sat at a table by myself. After lunch, I went back to what had been my cube.
I tried stopping in to see O’Connor several times but he wasn’t there. By three in the afternoon, every scrap of food that had ever had contact with my laptop’s keyboard had been removed, cleaned, catalogued, and mentally filed for future reference.
At four, O’Connor walked to his desk. I followed. By the time I got there, he was on his phone. I waited. And waited. It sounded like O’Connor was talking with a hooker. About golf. Close to five, still on the phone, he started packing up his things. Then he hung up and started walking past me.
“Um, Barry,” I started.
“Oh yeah, hotshot,” he said, “I guess we’ll have to talk tomorrow. I expect you here no later than eight. Otherwise, you’ll be violating the terms of your severance agreement.”
“Talbot said I only had to come in if needed,” I replied.
“That’s right,” O’Connor said, “And I need you here. I’m your boss, and I’m your boss for twenty nine more days. Don’t you forget it, hotshot.”
Then he walked out.
The next morning, I arrived at eight. My broken chair no longer had a seat. Realizing I might have to come back for a whole month, I went to talk to Linda Trefontaine, the secretary of Stan Delacroix, the vice president in charge of the division I apparently was still in.
“Sorry,” she said, “I can’t get you network access and I can’t order you a chair. You’re not a regular employee anymore and you’re not a contractor either. Technically you’re only here to train people in what you do so you can be replaced and that means you don’t need equipment.”
I walked back to my desk. O’Connor was waiting for me.
“Where were you?” he asked, “Don’t start slacking off just because you’re a short timer or I’ll tell HR you aren’t cooperating.”
“I was talking to Linda Trefontaine,” I said, “And I’m not slacking off. I’m waiting for you to tell me what to do.”
“Why don’t you type up a description of everything you do and you do it? I’m going to have to take over for you, after all” O’Connor said.
“I’d like to,” I said, “But that’s what I what I was discussing with Linda. I can’t get network access. Without network access, I can’t pull the files I need or get you the information you want.”
O’Connor stopped in his tracks. “I’ll think of something for you, don’t you worry about that, hotshot. But in the meanwhile, wait here. I need to be able to find you.”
When O’Connor walked away, I thought about pulling out my personal laptop which I had brought from home. It was in my briefcase. I badly wanted to work on my resume. But it was obvious that if I had a working laptop, even one that couldn’t connect to the network, O’Connor would put me to work cataloguing all of my usual reports. While I would have done it for anyone else – as H kept telling me, my problem was that I was a workaholic, not that I was lazy – I had no intention of doing anything for O’Connor. I was quite confident that sooner or later he would actually have to do some of my work and I didn’t want to do anything that might inadvertently help him.
This left surfing the net on my phone. That day, I had brought my cell phone charger and I plugged the phone into the wall. Then I went looking for something that could pass for a chair. I came back ten minutes later with two boxes of printer paper. I probably could have taken a chair from one of the conference rooms, but something inside me perversely wanted to go the ghetto route. If I was being treated as a pariah I might as well go all the way.
Ten minutes later, while I was checking out a post on a new approach to the X.25 packet switching protocol, O’Connor walked over.
“What the heck do you think you’re doing, hotshot?” he asked.
“Reading up on packet switching,” I responded, pushing my cell phone into his line of sight.
For ten seconds, there was silence. O’Connor seethed. He thought he had caught me loafing, and he hadn’t. This was definitely information I had to keep abreast of for my job, or had been, in any case, before I got transferred into my temporary pricing assignment. But I saw it in his eyes, the way they lit up darkly the moment when he thought he found his loophole.
“I meant, why are you stealing from the company?” he asked, voice raised. That comment was sure to attract attention in the nearby cubes.
“Excuse me,” I said, “How am I stealing from the company?”
“You’ve got your own personal phone plugged into the socket. The company is paying for that electricity,” O’Connor all but yelled.
I looked at him like he was crazy. This made perfect sense, because he was crazy. “Everyone plugs their phone in, Barry. You do it yourself. You had your phone plugged in when you were speaking on it yesterday afternoon.”
“The fact that everyone else does it doesn’t mean I’ll allow it in my group. I can’t countenance how other managers manage their groups. But I won’t allow anyone who reports to me to steal from the company! And you are imagining things if you think I would ever do that myself,” he said.
I took a deep breath. “OK, Barry,” I said, “It won’t happen again.”
Barry harrumphed. Then, for good measure, he harrumphed again. With that, he turned around and walked away without even waiting to see whether I unplugged my phone. I noticed that Andrew Marley, one of Barry’s long-suffering direct reports, ripped his cell phone from the plug just before Barry walked by his cubicle. Barry’s attempts to inconvenience me were going to add weight to the cross the rest of his staff was already carrying.
The rest of the month passed very, very slowly. For the most part, I sat around and did nothing, ignored by everyone. Ironically, I spent most of my last week in regulatory training. During that month, however, I did manage to get a bit more information from Gordo. He seemed almost gleeful to tell me I wouldn’t be able to see the severance agreement until after I was no longer an employee, never-mind that that I had agreed to leave the company based on what I was told was in the agreement. He also happily implied that the terms of the agreement were subject to change since the agreement had not been signed.
Chapter 5. Severance
Until my last day at the office, I had managed to suppress a lot of my concern over the job market simply by going to work every day. But once the crutch was taken away all my fears surfaced at once. I couldn’t hide from reality any longer, I was frankly scared. For the past month, every day after work I applied for jobs. Sometimes I applied online, but I also spent a lot of time networking – that is, telling everyone I knew my job was about to come to an end and I needed a new one. People commiserated, but nobody had any pointers that were useful. Somehow, I needed to beat the odds and get a job, and ideally pretty soon.
By the time I got home, I had a cold boulder in the pit of my stomach. I think the same boulder was sitting in H’s stomach too. We had an argument over something trivial. Neither of us was able to stop, even when Jeremy got very distressed and started wailing.
The next morning, I drove back to M & O and walked into the building, but this time I was really, definitely, truly not an employee any more. For one thing, my badge didn’t work.
Reception called Gordo. Gordo made me wait
forty-five minutes before he came down to see me. He escorted me to one of the small meeting rooms on the first floor. The conference rooms were actually outside the company’s security perimeter – a badge wasn’t needed to get to them. I had never given it any thought, but at that moment I understood this probably was Security 101 – keep potentially disgruntled employees, or rather, potentially disgruntled former employees outside.
Gordo looked like he had put on fifty pounds in the last few months. He was huffing and puffing and I was frankly surprised he made it the hundred feet from reception.
Once in the meeting room, Gordo offered me coffee and donuts. I turned down both. Gordo took a coffee and two donuts. One of the donuts was glazed, the other was covered with chocolate and sprinkles. Once we sat down, he asked for my badge and I handed it over.
In turn Gordo handed me a packet of materials, including phone numbers for HR and the company that would handle my extrication from M & O’s systems: TR2 Nexis. TR2 Nexis was my point of contact for getting on COBRA and transferring my 401-K into an IRA.
Next he handed me the severance agreement. The key number – the amount they were going to pay me, provided I agreed to sign it – was sitting near the top of the front page. It was twenty percent higher than I expected. I decided to keep my mouth shut for the moment and see where this meeting was going.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Gordo said, “You and I are going to read this contract together. Then you have 90 days to sign it if you’d like. If you do sign it, you have five days from that point to revoke your signature.”
He peered at me over his reading glasses.