Good Review. So What?

After 16 months out of work and 16 months into my new job, I finally got a performance review. You know, those employee-crushing exercises in management power plays in which you are told nothing you did is good enough and impossibly high goals are set for next year. What a joy!

Fortunately, I’m happy to report, my most recent review was quite good, glowing even. Hey, after my brutal layoff and some nasty, nitpicking performance evaluations in the past, I’ll take it. The opposite is too unpleasant to think about.

I even got a raise…2.5%. Not much, but anything helps at this point. I can’t keep dipping into my savings every month.

Nevertheless, as my best friend would say, “So the fuck what.”

I’m no longer naïve enough to believe doing a good job will save my position when cutbacks come. Right now, I know at my company, the All White Males Club is evaluating the entire organization. Who knows what positions they will decide to hack? Will they keep the good workers or save their cronies?

I will say this again, in today’s workplace doing a good job is no guarantee you will keep your job. Unfair? Yes, but that’s the way it is.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to do good work. In my new job, I’ve worked my formerly unemployed butt off, been helpful to co-workers, kept my mouth shut and haven’t make any major mistakes. I came close to getting reamed out once, but it didn’t happen because I happened to be working on what the manager wanted. Whew!

Yet, if they decide to eliminate my position, it won’t matter one iota.

Which brings me to the subject of an upcoming post: Loyalty—A One Way Street.

Bitterness is My Brand

As any reader (hello, are you out there?) of this blog has probably surmised by now, I’m pretty bitter about my layoff. OK, a lot bitter.

Please, bear with me and hear me out about why I still have lingering bitterness over my layoff.

In our society, we are not supposed to be bitter or angry. We’re supposed to forgive those who have wronged us. Get over it and move on is the advice most people would give you after something bad, like a layoff, has happened to you. If you are angry or bitter, it will only hurt your long-term happiness, so said one guy I used to work with (who wasn’t laid off). Easy for him to say; he still had a job. What about my long-term happiness without an income stream?

Yet I wonder if that is the best or most realistic advice. It’s easy to say the words “I forgive you,” but unless you truly feel them in your heart, you cannot heal and you’re just fooling yourself.

That old saying, “Time heals all wounds” is certainly true. Why should we be so quick to forgive anyway? It’s almost like a double-hurt: You want to forgive and get over it, because that’s what everybody says you should do, but you can’t. The pain is still there. Then you feel bad because you can’t forgive.

You feel like a bad person because you cannot forgive, at least not yet. No, you are not a bad person. You are merely dealing with a painful situation in your own way, in your own time.

For some people, it may take only days or weeks to forgive. For others, forgiveness may take a much longer time, possibly years. It’s really up to the individual and how they process the hurt and pain of being thrown out of a job and being unemployed for a long stretch of time.

And do we have to forgive everything? Yes, I forgive the young driver who skidded on a wet road surface and dented my car. It was not done intentionally and it really wasn’t his fault.

Forgiving my douchebag former bosses for putting me out of work in favor of people with less experience and higher paychecks is taking a lot longer. Perhaps if I knew the true reasons behind my layoff I could understand why they did what they did and forgive them. But I doubt I’ll ever get a truthful answer, so I’m left to wonder why and that’s hurtful.

Maybe if the actual termination had been handled a bit more humanely I would not feel so, well, bitter. No I was essentially told I was there too long, making too much money, so clean out my desk and leave. No thank you for 16-plus years of hard work.

Yes, I’ve thought long and hard about what I did that may have led to my layoff. Were my poor tech skills to blame? Maybe. Did all those petty tiffs I had with co-workers finally come back to haunt me? Possibly.

Although I’ll never know why, I have taken my new job as a second chance and tried to upgrade my tech skills, making better progress than I would have ever thought (although I will never be a tech person). I’ve worked hard to get along with co-workers (even when they really should be bitch-slapped) and have been quite successful. Whenever I’ve felt myself falling back on bad habits, I’ve quickly changed my behavior.

And I can honestly say that the bitterness over my layoff is peeling away from me, thin layer after thin layer. I’ve forgiven most of the bosses and co-workers who threw me under the bus. I understand why they did what they did and I forgive them and wish them well. I don’t want anything to do with them anymore, but I do forgive them.

The only one I cannot forgive is the head of the company, a truly despicable human being who uses his position to abuse other people to compensate for his own unhappiness and shortcomings. Instead of trying to make the company more profitable, he preferred to go out drinking with his buddies and lay off other people to save himself. Someday, he will be held accountable for his actions.

For many months, I wished the company would go under. But not anymore. That doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon, so why hope for it. Besides, I don’t want to see the many good, hardworking people I used to work with out of a job. Yes, they choose to stay, but I don’t want to see them unemployed because the head of the company has no clue how to make the business profitable.

As far as me being bitter, well, most of my bitterness has been expressed to former co-workers who were also laid off. Those were private conversations between colleagues and it went no further. During job interviews, I certainly never expressed any bitterness toward my former company. I simply said I was let go for economic reasons.

The only time I let my bitterness and anger get the better of me was when I told my former boss one of the editors used a story I wrote a year-and-a-half earlier. But that was clearly plagiarism. I also felt they kicked sand in my face by letting her do that. I mean, if my work wasn’t good enough to justify continued employment, then why was a story I wrote being used again?

What happened to her? I regretfully report that she was let go. I don’t feel good about getting someone fired, but even she later admitted she was the cause of her termination. (Yes, I told her what I had done and apologized. I honestly felt they would simply give her a slap on the wrist.) I still feel awful about it, although she quickly got another job (helped by the head of my former company who wouldn’t lift a hand to help me) and seems happy.

Still, I learned a valuable lesson. When we take action out of bitterness and anger, other people can get hurt.

All the more reason I need to forgive my former bosses…and maybe, just maybe, myself.