After a long day of meetings at the office it is nice to be home with an almost-empty agenda! There was originally going to be a church meeting tonight, but it has been postponed until Sunday. A marvelous gift is an evening with a fair amount of free time available. So, I’ve caught up on the e-mail, handled some minor work stuff, and after this post, will wind down the night. Nina just finished watching a move Two Weeks Notice. It must have been a pretty good movie as she chuckled several times. I wasn’t much interested in a movie tonight.

We’ve just finished a very stressful week at work. Last Wednesday the company I work for not only released it’s first quarter earnings, but it also did another reorganization. The figures released to the financial community were that 11% of the workforce was impacted. My arithmetic suggests that’s around 500-600 people, but I don’t know the real figures. A few people in my organization were "impacted", the euphemism for loosing their jobs. I think that the hardest job a manager has to do is to lay someone off.

I remember vividly the first time I was laid off. In September, 1980 a good friend persuaded me to transfer from the Automotive Worldwide group and a pretty good job into another part of TRW and take an inside sales job. It’d look good on my resume to have sales experience and all that. The job was to sell Datapoint computer hardware into TRW. I was reasonably good at this job, but within a couple of weeks of joining this group, TRW announced that they had sold the business back to Datapoint Corporation. The sale would be consumated in August, 1981.

For about nine months there was no further word on what this sale was going to mean. Then one day I got a phone call from a fellow in Personnel (what we used to call Human Relations) in California. He was going to be in the area the next day and wanted me to meet him for breakfast at a nearby hotel. I arrived, quite naively ate a good breakfast, while he extolled the virtues of working for TRW. After the check arrived and he put it on his room bill, the axe was lowered. Datapoint Corporation was buying back the business, alright, but none of the people were going with it. On September 1st, I would be without a job. I would be paid through the end of August, could look around the company for another opportunity, but on September 1st, my job ended. There was no severance package; I guess they thought the three-month’s lead time was sufficient.

I left the hotel and as I walked to my car in the parking lot, I sicked up the entire breakfast, the previous evening’s dinner, and lots of meals before that. Then I had to go into the office and tell the folks working for me that they would be out of a job on September 1st. We then locked up the office and all went home for the day.

In the end, as they usually do, things worked out. I did find two other potential jobs within TRW, but turned them both down to take a consulting position with Systemation, Inc. I was able to close up the office at TRW on August 31st and show up for work at Systemation the next morning. Never-the-less, I still have the name of the idiot who laid me off and hope to meet up with him in the hereafter! Maybe it won’t matter then, but even today some 22 years later, I still bristle at the remembrance of that day. I’m still not ready to discuss the second time I was laid off. Lots of anger remains over that event. Oh well! Time to wind up the day.