On Getting Laid Off in the Motor City

There's how you think you'd handle it, and then there's how you actually handle it.

First off, you don't think you're going to get laid off. Not you. You're too talented, you've been given too many high-profile, hot projects, and the client has just recently fallen madly and deeply in love with you.

In fact, at a one o'clock meeting the client and you were practically brushing each other's hair and painting each other's toenails. Who could have predicted that at 3:45 you would be fired? Let's not call it "laid off." "Laid off" has always sounded temporary to me. As though you've just been set to the side until more work comes around and your services will be needed again.

No. You've been fired. You're done.

So you may have imagined the possibility that you might get fired. I mean, you live in Detroit, you work in the automotive industry, um, you'd be a fool not to think it could happen. But the brain does what it does to survive, and in order to survive, it decides it is not going to be separated from the rest of its body with the clean slice to the neck a la corporate guillotine.

Despite the neat and clean severing of you from your employment, and despite the fact that you've practiced your gracious and mature exit in your head over and over again for the past six months, things don't go as planned.

First you'd planned not to get fired.

That didn't work out.

Next, you planned to be gracious and mature, to smile sagely and to nod your head in understanding as you're told your position has been eliminated due to the economy. You planned to shake hands and tell everyone how much you enjoyed working with them, how much you loved this job above all other jobs you'd ever had, and how proud you'd been to work for this particular company, representing that particular automaker.

And it all would have been true, had you managed to utter a word of it.

What happened instead is you started bawling like a baby the moment you heard your friend get the call. What happened instead is your phone rang next and the blood turned cold as it ran down your single-mother, single-income, family-less body.

You cried as you walked down the corporate green mile. You cried as you stopped by the restroom and tried to dry your tears. You threw your head back in the mirror and braced your shoulders.

"Don't cry," you admonished yourself.

You walked out the door and immediately burst into tears again. You cried all the way from one office to the next. You cried as they went over the paperwork. You cried as you signed the paperwork. You cried and could hardly acknowledge your beloved co-workers looking as though their hearts were breaking for you.

You cried as you fumbled for your purse and keys. You cried as they escorted you to the lobby.

There wasn't a moment of grace until you saw a co-worker walking in as you were being escorted out. There was a moment of grace as she walked up and embraced you, and kissed the side of your head as she told you, "I loved working with you. I love you," and she kept hugging you as though her love would hold you together.

And that is what you left with.

Love intact.

And a helluva resolve to find a new job in this beaten city. That's how you hoped you'd handle it. This part at least you can pull off with grace and dignity intact.