Making Plans for Wigwam

So, my little droogies, in the last episode of "As the Wigwam Spins," we found out that getting fired can be a tad, shall we say, depressing. And of course, it gets worse.

It's not like I had a lot of experience in getting fired to fall back upon. In 45 years on this earth, I've been fired exactly twice. Once for reading a newspaper on-duty at a gas station when I was 15, and once in NC for reading my email while on-duty and...hey. I detect a trend here. Frightening. Well, if this trend of getting fired once every 30 years is accurate, then I'm going to have another problem when I'm 75. I'll have to make a note.

Things you find out when you get fired:

1. You find out who your friends are really quickly. They come rushing to your aid, even before you can ask for help. They're distributing your resume, talking you up to their friends, reaching out to friends of friends to try to get you an interview somewhere, anywhere. They're getting out checkbooks and demanding that you take their money as a loan so that you won't have to worry about losing your house while you're looking for work.
2. People are vaguely uncomfortable being around someone who has been fired. It's like you have managed to catch a social disease. Not only are they worried about catching it, but there is a vague whiff of "you must have done something awful to deserve it."
3. No one likes to hear the truth. They want to hear you say that you got laid off, or that you got fed up and quit. They do not want to hear you say that you got fired, and worse, you got fired for breaking a rule that a) you knew about and b) you broke anyway.
4. When (3) above happens, they really, really, refuse to believe that you got fired for something as penny-ante as reading your personal email from work. Again with the "Uh-huh. Sure. Now, what did you really do?"
5. You can't draw unemployment when you get fired 'for cause'. Yeah. All my 'pals' who assumed that I'd be OK because I could just go on unemployment, afraid not.

Anyway, like I said, I learned a lot about being unemployed. It is embarrassing. It is frustrating. And of course, it is financially painful. I thank God for our friends and family, though. Without them, we'd have been in a real pickle. Not that it was pleasant as it was, but it was bearable.

I got busy and started making plans. Got the resume together, starting searching in earnest for jobs on websites like Dice, Hotjobs, and Monster. Reached out to old coworkers who knew the quality of my work and who could put in a good word for me or float a resume in. Thought and talked with Mrs. Wiggy a lot about what we wanted our next move to be.

Here's something interesting that I learned. When you lose a job (well, I didn't really lose it, it is still where I left it - just someone else will do it now), you tend to think in short strokes - as if your first step should be to get another job. That might not be the right answer.

In our case, another job in my industry would require a move. That is, the type of work I do is not commonly found in most industries, and I am only worth a certain amount of money if I am working in the companies that use the software I'm trained to work with. Make sense? I can't go down the street to the next big company and apply - if they don't use that software, they'll a) have no use for me, or b) only be willing to pay me trainee wages, which won't pay my mortgage. I'm too far along in my career now to change what I do, unless I were to reduce my overall debt to zero and we could live on a lot less.

When we bought our home, we paid a good price for it, but we bought it with no money down, using my VA benefits. This means we have practically no equity in it, and the housing market is soft now, so the price of the house hasn't risen substantially in the two and a half years we've owned it. Plus, we still have not repaired the damage done by the Dogs of the Apocalypse when they gnawed through our kitchen floor and portions of the walls when they were puppies. So I doubt we could expect top-dollar unless we invested quite a bit in the house.

I remember when we bought the house. The previous owners had also purchased using a VA loan, and had lived in the house about 18 months before the husband was transferred elsewhere and they had to leave the area. They had seen the price of the house go up slightly since they bought it, according to the county records, so they made a small profit, according to the price they paid and the price they sold. Nevertheless, they had to bring a check for something like seven thousand dollars with them to the closing. We haven't got anything resembling seven thousand dollars laying around. So even selling our house might be a bit of a problem at the moment.

Well, what about relocation? At my level, some companies pay relocation for permanent workers. The company that had just fired me did. They paid a LOT to move our stuff from New Mexico to North Carolina - good job they didn't fire me during the first year, I'd have had to pay that back. But it is getting a bit difficult to find jobs that pay relo at less than executive management positions these days, everyone is tightening their belts. And, assuming we could find relo money, there is still the problem of selling our existing house.

And what would we find if we did find a company willing to pay relo and we somehow resolved the problem of our existing house? Where would we be? Would we like it? Should we just take the first opportunity that presented itself, and to hell with where we ended up living?

When I left my 'traveling job', it was to get off the road - I had been a 'road warrior' for a very long time - nearly seven years of flying 150,000 miles a year or so. I was on the road six days out of seven. I'd fly home on a Saturday, get home Saturday afternoon, and drive to the airport again on Sunday morning. Didn't make for much of a home life. And to be quite honest - as I started into my fourties, my body began to complaint about what I was putting it through. In my line of work, I could not take time off to visit a dentist or a doctor for routine things - taking a day off work meant missing a week's work, because assignments ran from Monday to Friday, 8-5. So I could not just take a doctor's appointment and fly home that day and fly back the next. Doesn't work like that. So, things tended to get put off until they became emergencies. One week in San Jose nursing a shattered wisdom tooth, followed by a day spent in an emergency room with (what I thought was) a heart attack (turned out to be a probable embolism in my lung, frequent flier's disease) and then some developing problems that I could see becoming bigger issues later on - nah, it was time to go.

So, when I took the job that I had just gotten fired from, it was after a long thoughtful process and many discussions with Mrs. Wiggy. We even took some of her vacation time and flew out and drove around the state to see if it was the kind of place she'd like to live in (I already had done some work in the area, I knew I liked the general geography of the place, and I've always been drawn to small towns). When we decided to go for it, we thought of it as our 'happily ever after' place. It was the job I'd keep until retirement, it was the home we'd live in until it was paid off and we were retired. Yeah, OK, so I was a sucker. I give you permission to call me an idiot.

Getting back to the point, though - did we want to just roll the dice and go wherever a potential employer happened to be located - the first one that happened along and was willing to offer me a job?

The solution presented itself in due course, but it was one that I had not considered at first - and this gets back to my point about 'finding another job' as not necessarily being the best solution to the problem.

What we really needed were two things. The first was to keep a roof over our heads. The second was time. Breathing room, if you will. Time to draw up plans to get on with our lives, figure out where we wanted to live, what we wanted to do, and so on. Taking another full-time permanent job would accomplish the first, but would rush us into the second.

So, we hit on the idea of doing contract work. I knew about it, of course. The folks who work on 3 or 6 or 12 month contracts for companies that are often known in the industry as 'bodyshops'. They employ these people, but only for the term of the contract they negotiate with another company, the company that actually needs the help. For this, they handle the contract, they take out taxes and usually offer health insurance and even 401(k) and so on, and they take a cut and pay the rest in the form of an hourly wage to the worker.

I had been contacted many times by headhunters over the years. My industry is small - the software I am expert in represents and even smaller slice of the pie. So my name pops up, someone gives me a call and pitches this contract or that contract. I had always turned them down - when I was traveling for a living, I was making way more than they could offer me, and when I came off the road, I had no desire to go back into that type of situation.

However, now the situation had changed. The immediate hourly wage that such a job could offer would address our need to keep paying our mortgage (imagine that), and keep food on the table. The short-term nature of the contract itself would give us some time to figure out what we really wanted to do, and to wait for the right permanent opportunity to present itself once we had made that decision.

So, I started paying attention to contract jobs, and the skies began to clear a bit. By this time, I had been unemployed about a week. It was the middle of October.

Next episode - "Woah, there pardner. Detroit?"

Until then!

Smooches,

Wiggy

And Then, Depression Set In

So, as I revealed in my last chapter, I got my happy ass fired. I declined the rent-a-cop's kind offer to drive me around the building, ankled around the back of my former employer's parking lot and retrieved my car, and I drove home.

As I left, I got on my cell phone and called Mrs. Wiggy, gave her an abbreviated version of the news. Probably not the smartest thing I could have done, but I needed to tell someone. When I got home, I told Mrs. Wiggy's mother, who lives with us. She was shocked, angry at the company, and certain that they'd done me a great injustice.

I wanted to be mad at them. I mean, they just sacked my ass. And it was for such a penny-ante thing, too. Not for being hard to get along with, not for failing to do my work, not for substandard work or stealing or smacking stupid managers upside their punkin haids. No. For using their equipment to access the Internet in a way which was prohibited. And the kicker - I had been warned. Whom could I be mad at but myself?

I called my former bosses' boss later that day, to make arrangements to retrieve the rest of my stuff. He didn't answer, I got his voice mail. Left a carefully-worded polite message.

He called back after 5:30 p.m. I could not come get my stuff, he said. He'd have someone box it up and I could retrieve it from the security lobby the following morning. He wanted to know what time I'd be there. I said 9 a.m. We hung up.

And so I was mad at myself. I sat at home for the next several days, searching online job sites like Monster, HotJobs, and Dice, and playing the firing over and over again in my mind. Had trouble sleeping, of course. Mrs. Wiggy was a trouper, as was her mom. I checked in with my friends, they all offered their support and offered to help in various ways. I didn't hear one word from my former coworkers, though. Not one freaking word. Nada. Silencio.

The next day, however, I got up and got dressed and went in to work - sort of. I got to the front desk and found my stuff all in boxes, labeled with my name. Now, the security desk has kind of a mini-lobby in it, usually full of contract janitors waiting to be let in so they can begin cleaning - but not this morning. It was empty except for a couple of guys in suits, who were each talking on their cell phones and looking at me.

Hmmm. Yep, they were looking right at me. Hard. Then I saw the open suit jacket and the pistol one guy was wearing tucked in the waistband of his trousers. Ah. Cops. Once again, I'm thinking, "You have got to be kidding me." Cops? For what?

I picked up my boxes, one by one, and took them out to my car. The suits didn't offer to help, but they kept up their imaginary conversations while I came and went. I almost starting thinking they were not there because of me.

Then I came to the last box. As I carried it outside, both guys folded up their cell phones and and walked outside. They followed me out, walked past me, and got into their clearly marked Wilson Police Department car. Very stealthy. I'm surprised that I did not see the car when I drove in, but I guess my mind was on other things.

Good Lord, what am I, Public Enemy Number One? I got fired, not arrested! I didn't do anything illegal, I accessed my personal email from work - I violated company policy, not the law! I just shook my head. Got in the car.

Then I remembered that I had my 'security token' in my pocket. A device given to me by my former employer so that I could access my work PC from home when I was on-call. I had no use for it, but I could imagine the bastards charging me for not returning it. So I walked back inside one last time to return it to the security guard.

The poor girl looked terrified. She was behind an inch of bulletproof glass like a convenience store clerk, and I was just a guy who got fired - and she looked like she was going to cry. I slid my security token through the slot at the bottom of the window like I was paying for a Slurpee on the way home from a bar, and told her she might want to return it to my former boss. She just stared at me and nodded. I have no idea what they must have told her about me, but she looked like she expected me to whip out a flamethrower and do some serious carnage right then and there.

I left, with four cardboard boxes representing nearly three years of my life; everything except my self-esteem and dignity.

When I got home, I found a message on the voice mail. It was from my dermatologist, whom I had just been referred to by my family doctor about a, er, pesky rash problem I had been having. He said I most likely have psoriasis. Lovely. Isn't that just freaking special?

So, I Got Fired...

Time for me to emerge from my hole and start talking again. I apologize for the delays. Short version: I got my happy ass fired from my job, found a new one, and am now in the process of picking up the pieces. The longer version is, well, longer.

Let's back up a bit. September, 2006 in the wayback machine. I'm in Wilson, NC, living in my happy little bungalow with Mrs. Wiggy, Mrs. Wiggy's mom, two Dogs of the Apocalypse, three cats, and an unidentified rodent chewing on the wires in our attic. I drive two miles to work everyday. My life is slow, uneventful, and this is a good thing.

Then, I got a warning from my employer. I had replied to a blog entry that I read on my lunch hour, and I inadvertently quoted an obscenity that the person I was replying to had used. In other words, to a complete idiot, it might look like I said the naughty word.

Well, it appears a complete idiot was reading my reply that day. He or she complained to the blog owner. That person complained to my employer. They investigated, found out I have made the response, and gave me a warning not to use that type of language online again from work. They didn't give me a chance to explain that I hadn't used the word in question, but whatever. Fair enough, I should not have even quoted it. Point made.

Now, let's move forward to October.

One day, on a Friday, our office is visited by the local 'hatchet lady' from Human Resources. Speculation runs rampant. Some feel that she is there to sack the whole lot of us. After all, we've had a lot of layoffs and downsizings and offshorings of late - so it could be the end for all of us. However, the end of the day comes, and no one is gone. We go off on a three-day weekend.

On Monday, I come to work, sit down, boot up my laptop, and log into my workstation. My phone rings. It's my boss. She asks me to come to her office.

Oh. I know, with ringing certainty, what this is. I'm getting the sack. Not the entire department. Just me.

I walk down the hallway to her office, and she meets me outside her door. She asks me to walk with her down this hallway to a conference room I've never been to before. Inside, there are several people. My bosses' boss. The hatchet lady from HR. Oh yeah, and two uniformed armed guards. Yeah, armed guards. In uniforms.

Now, this is interesting. I've seen people get fired at this company - they've never had armed guards. In fact, they didn't get marched to some undisclosed location or meet with the hatchet lady. They just got called to their bosses' office, got the sack, and he escorted them to the door. Armed guards?

The hatchet lady introduces herself to me and holds out her hand to shake hands. Shake hands? I have to shake hands with the woman who is about to lop off my snarglies? Sigh. OK, let's get on with it. I shake her hand and we sit down.

My boss is upset, visibly shaken, and nearly in tears. She reads a prepared statement that goes kind of like this:

"On [date], you were warned against inappropriate use of the internet using company property. Our network security team has monitored your workstation, and we have determined that you have used the internet in an inappropriate manner. Your employment is therefore terminated, effective immediately."

Wow. OK, I'm racking my brain here. What did I do? I know I didn't do or say anything on any blog that would get me turfed. Oh. I think I know. Email.

The company has a policy against accessing personal email from work. That means no Yahoo mail, no Google mail, no web-based email thingies. Most of them are blocked - you can't even access them. But I have my own clever little domains, and I have my own web and email servers, and I just ignored that little rule. The previous Friday, I had noticed that my access to my little email webserver was suddently blocked. A-hah.

[Note: I can only guess that's what it was that got me fired. They never told me the specifics.]

I was thinking to myself, "They were serious about that rule?" Hmmm. Guess so.

About this time, my former boss stands up. We all stand up. None of us are looking at each other. We make vague motions towards moving to the door. We begin to move.

I asked, "Ah, excuse me? Can I go back to my desk and get my car keys and wallet and stuff?"

My former bosses' boss interposes himself between me and the door.

"You can't go back to your desk."

"How do I get my car keys, my wallet, my briefcase, and the rest of my personal stuff?"

He hems and haws. They all look at each other. Apparently, no one thought this through. You'd think they'd have this kind of planned out.

"Well, you can't go back to your desk."

"Well, I'm not going to walk home. Without my car keys and my wallet, I can't unlock my car, I can't unlock my house."

My former boss decides that she'll go and get my stuff. I'm thinking that I have a lot more stuff than she's going to be able to carry. We stand and look at each other while she's gone - the security guards hover around, looking important. We say nothing to each other. She returns with my car keys, my wallet, and my briefcase. Apparently, they've decided to hold my lunch and my coffee hostage.

My former bosses' boss asks me, "Where is your car parked?"

"In the back of the building (in the employee parking lot, duh)."

He blinks at me. "You can't go back there."

"How do I get my car?"

"You can't go back there."

OK, we're getting nowhere, and the rent-a-cops are getting nervous. I go with my former bossses' boss towards the front of the building, away from the parking lot, my car, my lunch, and my coffee. Away from my desk. Well, correction on that. Away from what was my desk.

We walk to the front of the building, and I go through the security turnstile one last time. My former bosses' boss asks me for my key card, which I surrender. I ask him, "How do I get my personal belongings? I have a lot of books and stuff at my desk."

He blinks at me again. He stares. He clearly has no idea what to say. He blinks again. Finally, he says, "You can call me at my desk and come pick up your stuff after five o'clock."

One of the security guards opens the front door. The other puts his hand on my shoulder and tries to propel me through the door. I'm incredulous.

"You've got to be kidding. Take your hand off me."

"Sorry, sir, it's my job."

I give up. Whatever. He escorts me out the door and removes his hand. I look back - my bosses' boss is gone. The security guards are leaving. I ask the one who had his hand on my shoulder, "What happens if I try to walk around behind the building and get my car? I have to have it to get home."

He shrugs. "Not my job to stop you from doing that. My job is over now. I'll even give you a ride around the back if you want."

I go get in my car and drive home. I'm fired. No more job. And the bastards still have my lunch. Worse, they have my coffee.