Burning Bridges

I have a very bad habit. I know I should stop, but I can’t.

What is this bad habit? Do I drink too much? No, just a glass of wine on the weekends.  Spend too much on clothes? You betcha. Eat too much chocolate? Guilty pleasure.

No, the habit I refer to is my strange fascination with articles on how to deal with a layoff. You know the kind: All sorts of original advice like you should network to get another job after being laid off. (Really? You mean I can’t rob a bank.)

I know it’s silly. All it does it bring me back to that awful day and the 16 months I spent lonely, stressed and unemployed.

Maybe I do it because I’m looking for some comfort or explanation of why I so rudely treated by former employer.

No, instead I get nuggets like this: “You should know it’s just as embarrassing and gut-wrenching for the company: They don’t have the money to pay you.”

Oh, right: Corporations are people, too. I’ll go out on limb and bet the writer, Rebecca Thorman of U.S. News & World Report’s Money page, is going to vote for Mitt Romney.

My first thought was, has this chick ever been laid off? Does she know how it really feels? Probably not.

And that wasn’t the only advice this moron gave that got my blood boiling. She said that we shouldn’t burn our bridges with our former employer. Hey, I think my former bosses burned their bridges with me when they laid me off.

Yes, I understand we should be calm when our world is collapsing around us. I’m not advocating any kind of verbal or physical violence. Not at all.

I admit, I did snap a bit when I was brutally told I was being laid off. But I never raised my voice or swore at anyone. I told my boss I didn’t want to talk to him, and I also snapped at a former co-worker who I later found out threw me under the bus to save one of her office buddies. Even then, I said, “Don’t talk to me. You have a job.” Not that bad, really.

My biggest issue is with the advice that we should take our layoffs lightly and go quietly into a long stretch of unemployment, a severe drop in income, possible foreclosure and bankruptcy without so much as a peep of protest. Not bloody likely. I say, make your displeasure known to your douche-bag former bosses. It’s probably the last chance you’ll ever get. They've already laid you off, so they can't do anything else to you.

What about how the layoffs were handled? Why was I laid off when people who had less time in the company and made more than me kept on? I’ll tell you why: Because managers are allowed to cherry-pick who stays and goes and that’s extremely unfair.

But how can I expect someone who has never been laid off but yet gets to tell us how we’re supposed to feel to understand?