Ever since I announced that I’d been laid off, I’ve had a lot of kind offers from people who wanted to take me out for a beer. I was IM’ing with one of those people yesterday.
“Sorry to hear about the job,” he said. “Did you get my email offering to take you out for a beer sometime? I was wondering if it ended up in your spam folder.”
“Thanks, and yeah, I got your mail,” I replied. “Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. I’ve been busy with interviews, and I’ve accepted an offer. I’ll announce it on the blog on Friday.”
“Cool,” he said, and we both went back to work.
About ten minutes later, he IM’d me again.
“Holy crap. You’re not going to believe this. I just got laid off.”
“What?”
“I got called into ‘the meeting’, and they started talking about my severance.”
“Just after we were talking about me getting laid off?”
“Yeah. Weird, huh?”
“You know what? I will now buy you that beer.”
The timing of our conversation and his getting laid off were incredibly weird. It’s one of those things that makes you wonder if you’re not really alive, but just a character in a novel whose author has a mild sadistic streak.
Perhaps the new job will help me help him.
3 replies on “Terminated, Part 10: It’s Contagious!”
Your situation reminds me of this article I read the other day (where I work as a web designer – a rather large company) we’ve received 6, 5, and 4 already in the past four weeks. Eek.
http://www.cracked.com/article_16676_6-emails-you-get-when-your-company-about-go-under.html
Did he get fired from a tech startup as well?
[…] Back in mid-October, I wrote about an IM conversation with a friend. He’d heard about my getting laid off from b5media and offered to take me out for a beer. I told him that I’d accepted an offer and would announce it publicly a couple of days later. He then got called into a meeting, and IM’d me ten minutes later to tell me that he’d been laid off. […]