Samples - So, You've Been Downsized

So, You've Been Downsized
First published in IT Recruitermag

Downsized. That’s the New Millennium euphemism for getting laid off; canned; axed; gacked; pink-slipped; tossed overboard; eighty-sixed; shown the door; blown off; capped; let go; deep-sixed.

Fired.

The odds are pretty good that it wasn’t your fault. You put in the 70-hour workweeks. You lived on pizza, Twizzlers and Mountain Dew. You learned how to play fooseball and act like you were enjoying it. You were the perfect dot-com employee. And now, with the demise of all the dot-coms, you’re sitting at home. Here are a few tips to keep you occupied until the next big thing comes along.

Go to the Mall: All right, I know what you’re thinking. No, I’m not suggesting that you blow all your severance pay at Gadzooks. The mall is just a great place to meet people. If you’re a guy, you may want to meet women. The best way to do this is to borrow a puppy or a baby. Of course, you’ll want to let the owner of the puppy or the baby know that you’re taking them, to avoid hard feelings and SWAT teams.

If you’re interested in meeting fellow geeks, just find a table in the food court, set up your Palm Pilot with the fold-out keyboard, hook up the wireless modem and check your email. You’ll be surrounded in seconds.

Of course, if you’re female, you already know the secret of attracting attention from males – be a female.

The mall also offers endless other diversions. You can develop a subroutine to hack the screensaver passwords on the display computers at Sears. You can sit by the fountain and name all the sparrows up in the rafters. You can get a cup of venté moca cappucino half-caf at Starbucks and read the Wall Street Journal or Internet World, impersonating an employed person. You can even pretend to be a store detective and follow people around, until the real store detective beats you up and throws you out.

Count the Lease Payments Remaining on your BMW: Now don’t you wish you’d listened to your dad and bought a car you could actually afford? Or kept the 87 Chevy that was paid for?

A corollary to this would be to count the stock options you earned at your last job. Those are the bits of paper you accepted instead of pay, remember? After you count them, you can cut them up and tablet them into phone message pads.

Go to a Movie: This is particularly effective in hot weather, when you want to avoid running up electric bills with the air conditioner. If you watch all eleven movies at the cineplex twice, you can kill a full day. In addition, one jumbo tub of buttered popcorn, while a tad pricey, can keep you sick to your stomach long enough to skip several meals, losing weight and saving money overall.

One note of caution – be careful which movies you watch. I once saw a Steven Segal film fifteen times, then walked into a bar full of rednecks. After standing up for the rights of oppressed people everywhere, I woke up in a dumpster two blocks away.

Pick Up your Unemployment Check: While this may seem an obvious thing to do, you need to consider it a matter of style. You probably should avoid showing up in Versacé shoes or wearing a Rolex. Anything from Tommy Hilfiger is ok, since he has a store in the outlet mall. Your best bet is blue jeans and a sincere t-shirt. Holes in your knees are optional. The main thing is to look hungry, not necessarily smelly.

Besides playing on the sympathy of the unemployment clerks, there may be some unexpected benefits to the waif look. The odds are the guy in line ahead of you is the HR cowboy who tossed you out of that interview last month. A little whimpering, some incoherent babbling, and you could ruin his whole day.

On the other hand, the unemployment line can be a pretty good place to network these days. You’ll rub elbows with a lot of IT executives. Even if you don’t get any job leads from them, you can find out what kind of wine goes best with Kraft Dinner.

Join a Bowling League: The bowling alley is a great place to network for a new job. You will meet the assistant managers from every fast-food restaurant in the area there. Believe it or not, there are people who work at bowling, and they are able to hit those little white jobbies whenever they want to. For this reason, you’ll want to practice hard. If you can establish an average of, say 50, you will have a high enough handicap that almost anything you do will help your team.

Just so you’re prepared, you will meet some women with really "big hair" at the bowling ally. This, unfortunately, does not reflect their cranial size or brain capacity – in fact, there is often an inverse relationship. If you wish to have a conversation with one of these women, it would be best to avoid opening lines like, "Say, I wonder of we could get a T3 connection with a wireless router working here."

You would do far better with something like, "Say, you shore do smell purty."

This is by no means an exhaustive list of options to fill your days. You could grow a mullet (for more information, go to mulletlovers.com or to any professional wrestling event). You could go to the gym (just don’t forget to dump a glass of water on the front of your gray tee shirt and grunt loudly whenever you pick anything up). The possibilities are endless. The important thing is to enjoy yourself. Another few years of 20-hour days at the keyboard are most likely just around the corner.

Back to Samples page