Oh, this is really funny, positively hilarious. I'd had this inspiration about the blog, that came to me sometime after I took the picture of the "23 Days" sign and posted it here. I thought I might work the blog around the theme of being unemployed, starting with what it was like to know you'd be unemployed in a matter of days, but had to go to work every day in spite of it, pretending things mattered. I took a photo of the "22" day sign, and then yesterday the "21" sign.
Then shortly after I got to work yesterday, our manager sent an email out to all of us, only at 7:00am there weren't very many of us there, saying we were going to have a meeting at 9:00am and all of us should make sure we were off the phone by 8:30am to make sure we would be on time for the meeting. Off the phones for a half hour before a meeting?
Well, that was worrisome. The only time we've all gotten off the phone at the same time for a meeting was the time they told us they were closing us down. So we started wondering if they were going to close us down earlier. The manager over my manager was there, which was unusual, and as my supervisor came in, she saw our human resources person with a bunch of folders in his office, so we knew something was up.
Then we remembered it was about 30 calendar days before the date we were scheduled to leave, December 12th, and they were probably just giving us the paperwork for our severance packages.
It's so strange, when we first thought they were going to let us go earlier, but still pay us through December 26th, we were happy and excited. Then when we thought they were just giving us the severance pay documents we were all depressed. Isn't that a little weird?
Not really. It was getting harder and harder to be there, harder to pretend things mattered, harder to care about learning their stupid new system. We were just marking time to the inevitable end, and we just wanted out. We knew we were going, no one was going to change their mind at the last instance, so why not stop prolonging our torture and let us go now?
Well, that's just what they did. Yesterday was my last day at work. When they announced it in the meeting they were a little shocked at the response. Everybody cheered! The torture was over and we could get on with it, finally. As we were madly packing up our desks, throwing stuff out, and hugging each other someone changed the 21 day sign to read 2 Hrs.
It was so odd to throw out things that a half hour before were so important, but now were meaningless. All the papers for the quality control work I had been doing--trashed. For some reason I didn't want to throw away the supervisors books in which I wrote down everyone's "scores" on status calls and accident reports. So I walked them over to Deeann and I'm sure she just trashed them in her trash can, rather than mine. I couldn't do it. I couldn't make the work I'd been doing so meaningless.
I threw away two trash cans full of stuff, and left behind assorted things belonging to the company--like headsets, markers, staples and staplers, and various office supplies.
All I took fit into one packing box, a box kindly left on our chairs while we were in the meeting and discovered by us when we emerged.
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