Tech & Biz

Howigotlaidoff.com: Blogger Chronicles Road to Unemployment

by Tina Kells | June 8, 2009 at 12:09 pm

122 views | 26 Recommendations | 3 comments

Imagine you get home from work one day to find a layoff notice in the mail... so begins the saga outlined at howigotlaidoff.com. Howigotlaidoff.com tells the tale of "Amanda," a blogger with an online diary that chronicles her journey down the road to unemployment. The first post on howigotlaidoff.com shows how heartless cutting employees has become.

In her first post "Amanda" tells how she received her pink slip. It is a callous retelling. One day at work she and her fellow employees are told there will be layoffs... and that the layoff notices were mailed to avoid emotional scenes in the workplace. Nice!

Furthermore, the layoff notices arrive and those being canned learn their last day is June 30, nearly a month away. So the howigotlaidoff.com blog begins...

So my last day here will be June 30th. After that some girl from another branch that is being closed will be sitting at my desk, with my job. I’m finding it extremely hard to be here right now. It just feels like a ticking time bomb. Each day it’s starting to get harder and harder to get up and come to work. Why am I still putting in all this effort for a place that doesn’t care that I’m not going to be able to keep my home?!

The idea of looking for a new job is scaring me to death right now. I’m in the Seattle area, where a ton of layoffs have already happened with Microsoft and WaMu, as well as Boeing. I’ll be up against all those people in my job search!

In these tough times layoffs are not making huge headlines because they are just too common. Even major layoffs are hard to cover since people do not want to hear about more economic doom and gloom. It has become all too easy to dehumanize those who are losing their jobs, not because we as a culture lack empathy, but because it is much to much to think about.

Howigotlaidoff.com allows web surfers to comment on "Amanda's" post and many have responded with their own lay off horror stories and words of encouragement. The laid off blogger who started howigotlaidoff.com is based in Seattle; anybody care to guess which Seattle-area based company let her go in such a cold manner?

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Paschen

at 14:28 on June 8th, 2009

This is a great post Tina. We need to recover our Humanity as individuals and as a Society. We seem to have lost it some where along the way to consumerism, disposable goods and fast food habits.

Tanmoy Deb

at 19:08 on June 8th, 2009

Nice post (but the stories are here not nice, very painful). I know one of my friend loose his job and came back India. Even one of them stopped his PhD and came back India.

Being an optimist, this is I believe, that somehow the some major mistakes in decision by some persons are the basic reason behind it. For example, In India, sudden price decreasing of the Flight, not taking the right price( it is one of them). The flight authority not able to compensate their price difference they did.

I think we need some group of co-working, passionate Economists, right now,who can understand this problem more well.

I believe that "Like every lock has the key, every problem has solution".

jazzyzazzy

at 02:06 on June 9th, 2009

John lenon sang...............Life is what happens to you while your busy making other plans.She just has to keep on keeping on.something will turn up for her.