This will be in the Omaha World-Herald on Sunday, October 3, 2010.
It will be in Section A of the newspaper.
This is the final proof (pdf file) of the advertisement.
I arrived at work around 8:30 AM that day. My phone was instantly ringing. I did not even get a chance to sit down. I saw the caller ID phone number. It was my boss calling from Dublin, Ohio . He asked me if I saw the meeting invite that he had sent me from about 11 PM the night before. I said, "No." He said I had a meeting in a conference room on the same floor. Someone was there waiting to meet me for a conference call with him. It was instantly obvious. I was losing my job. It was my last day there after 23 years. I dropped everything and went to the conference room to talk to these two people.
The day was March 10, 2009 when this happened. The S&P 500 index closed at 676.53 the day before. On March 10 the S&P 500 index went up over 6%. My life was crashing as the stock market rallied that day. (This is continued on the Internet at spring2life.com.)
(Continuation...)
I got to stay the entire day in the office. I did not have to go home. I had to fill out some last minute task on the computer. It was something like an exit survey but not really. I had access to my work PC the entire day. I could have written a good-bye email to all my contacts but I did not. It was too emotional for me at the time. I had seen the good-bye emails from others in the months before that. You heard rumors about layoffs as they happened from time to time. I only had two or three boxes of items to take home at the end of that day. I did not keep many things around my cube because of all the layoffs happening every few weeks. The boxes are still down in my basement somewhere getting dusty.
My email died around maybe 2 PM. I had put an out-of-office message for people to contact other employees in my absence. My email footprint was deleted within a day I heard. Many people never saw the out-of-office message. Any email to me just failed with an invalid email address.
I thought I had "job security" because there were only two of us working directly on my application. Well, I was wrong.
It was hard to walk around the floor that day. The word spread that it was my last day. Everyone I ran into wanted to talk for 10 or 20 minutes about what was happening. A few people stopped by my cube to talk to me. I stayed in my cube most of the day cleaning out my desk. I remember talking to a few people on the phone and saying it would do them no good to call me back about something in a few days. I would not be there after that day. It was a very strange day. I would say I "survived" the day. It was not an easy thing to live through. It is part of life. It is interesting to note that I started my first job out of college on March 10, 1975. It was exactly 34 years before that day.
I spent some of the day going through all the papers on my desk and filing cabinets. I put many documents into the shred bin.
I was told that my PC was to be boxed up after I left and mailed to Denver. They would scan all the documents saved on the hard drive for any important information.
I had to turn in some items the next day that belonged to the company and mail them back to Ohio. I sent them by way of company mail. I had about 50 pages of things to read over and sign and mail back to various addresses. This took many days to complete. I remember going to FedEx to have some documents notarized and delivered overnight to Denver.
I do have lunch still every few months with some of the people that were in my immediate work group. For the most part I have never had contact with the many people I worked with over the 23 years that I was there. It is embarrassing to lose your job. You feel worthless. It is your status. I still have not "landed" a job at the level that I was at and using the skill sets that I used.
In the days that followed I went to job search training at Lee Hecht Harrison. I met many people there in my same situation. Some of them I still see once a month for dinner. I had lots of free time. I usually get up at 5 AM, but as the months went on the wakeup time drifted to later and later. Now in 2010 I am back to 5 AM again since I have a new full-time job starting in June, 2010.
Losing my job was not all bad. You hear of making lemonade from lemons. I met many wonderful people. I had a few part-time jobs since March 2009. I still see some of these people from time to time. I am linked to a few of them on Facebook.
I would say that you would not be reading these words today, if I still worked at my job of 23 years. We get in ruts. It is good to mix things up. I would never had bought Hypercom stock for example without my current job. I would have no idea what Hypercom even was. I was blessed recently on September 30th with a return on investment of over 45 percent with HYC stock. It was a once in a lifetime event. It more than paid for these advertisements that you are reading. God has been very good to me. He is awesome. I tell people: "The gift that you have received... give as a gift."
I hope that gives you some insight into what happened to me on that day.
(end of Continuation...)
P.S. Happy Birthday Barb M.! Come to the big event at 40th and Webster this afternoon. Watch for more writings on October 10 ( 10.10.10 ) and October 17 ( Now Is The Time ).
