Day One, Again, and This Time on Purpose

It is a piece of plastic with a bad photograph on it and it opens one door on one floor of one building, and I have been carrying it in my hand rather than my pocket for four days.

The last one I had was taken from me in a room with two people in it and a document on the table, and I wrote the first issue of this paper eleven days later, mostly because I needed something to do at nine in the morning.

I want to be accurate about Monday rather than triumphant. It was a normal first day. I did not know where the toilets were. I was given a laptop that needed four hours of updates and I sat with it and watched a progress bar and could not have been happier about a progress bar.

The strange part was the middle of the afternoon, when somebody asked me a question about something I actually know, and I answered it, and they said thanks and went away. That was it. That was the whole thing. Nine months of applications for a four-second exchange in which somebody needed something I had.

The Severance Package was a paper about being laid off, written by somebody who was. That is no longer true as of Monday, and pretending otherwise would be the fastest possible way to make it worthless.

So it changes. Not the subject exactly — I am still going to write about how this stuff works, because nine months of it taught me things that are extremely hard to learn any other way and mostly go unwritten because the people who learn them are busy being unemployed.

What changes is the vantage point, and I lose something real there. Six weeks from now I will have stopped noticing the things I currently cannot stop noticing, and I will not know it has happened.

I have written the current list down, before it goes. Eleven things about the process that are obviously broken from outside and apparently invisible from inside. When I disagree with my own list in March, that will also be a piece.

We were a group chat. It started in January with six of us, all from the same round of cuts, all with the same useless advice being sent to us by well-meaning people.

One got something in April. I got something in August. Four are still in it, and two of those four are further from a job than they were in January, and no amount of my good news does anything at all about that.

The thing I want to say clearly, because I have now been on both sides of it inside a fortnight, is that a good-news message into a chat like that lands as a good-news message and also as a change in the arithmetic. There is one fewer person in the same position as you. That is not resentment. It is just true, and it is felt, and the person sending it usually cannot see it.

So I sent it to each of them separately, before the chat, which somebody did for me in April and I did not understand why until Monday.

Two hundred and eleven applications. Nineteen first conversations. Six processes that got past two rounds. Two final rounds, one of which I have written about here and did not get.

Four months of severance, then savings, then a decision in June about a car that I made badly and would make differently. One credit card I am going to be clearing until roughly March.

The salary is under what I was on. Not dramatically, and I would have taken considerably less, and both of those sentences are things you are advised never to say in public. I am saying them because the silence around this is exactly what makes everybody in it think they are uniquely failing.

Nine months is not a personal failure and it is not a market anomaly. It is roughly what this took, for one person, in this year, and the reason that number is shocking to read is that almost nobody who has lived it is in a position to publish it.