GETTING LAID off took me by surprise. I was dumbstruck, actually. As the mortgage crisis spiralled out of control and the Dow came crashing down last year, I followed the news as an objective observer, never foreseeing how it might actually affect me.
Layoffs were something that happened to everyone else. Something I reported on, in fact – not something I myself would experience. I finally had what I thought was the job of my dreams, working as a news producer for a cable television network. No one was going to take that away from me. Or so I thought.
When I came into work that mid-November morning, everything was business as usual. That is, until my manager tapped me on the shoulder and took me into a room for a surprise meeting with Human Resources – never a good sign.
As they went through their rehearsed “reorganisation” speech, I was speechless (apart from, to my embarrassment, my uncontrollable sobs). I grabbed what I could from my desk (huffing and puffing of course), did the walk of shame past my now former colleagues, and left the building.
Now what?
But as I looked around me, I saw many familiar faces, holding familiar paperwork and looking equally lost. I hadn’t been the only one. In fact, that morning, my company laid off around 50 people – some 20% of our San Francisco workforce – as part of a major “restructuring”. Sure, we had heard about layoffs at similar media companies and start-ups in the area, but for some reason, we had all naively thought we were immune.
Not knowing what to do with the rest of our day, we went straight to the bar, where we shared war stories from the morning and of course, fantasised about the downfall of our former employer. Two or three drinks later, it strangely started to feel like a celebration. We were all in this together, and everything would be okay! At least until the next morning.
Head pounding and still in last night’s clothes, I woke up wondering, for a split second, if it had all been a bad dream. The severance paperwork strewn across my coffee table told me otherwise. I decided, for the time being, to live in denial and go back to sleep.
But after a few days of daytime television, self-pity and frighteningly poor hygiene, it was time to pick myself up off the couch and evaluate my options. Feeling sorry for myself was not going to get me a job. Nor was stuffing my face with ice cream. And besides, I was starting to smell. I needed to get active, aggressive even. I wasn’t going to let the poor judgement of my former employer keep me down! I would be resilient! I would rise above it! If for no other reason, than out of spite.
One thing we “layoffees” talked incessantly about after the bloodbath was how so many talented people were let go – after all, we were a creative media company. Our workforce consisted primarily of ambitious, highly educated, tech-savvy young adults who, by nature, think “outside the box”. On the one hand, this made our situation all the more frightening. We now faced some stiff competition for whatever we found in the anorexic job boards. But on the other hand, we saw it as an opportunity. Tough times breed creativity. If we could join forces, maybe we could do something noteworthy together? And just like that, Unemploymentality.com was born.
My friend and former colleague, John Henion, and I decided that instead of talking about our unemployment to each other every day, we would create an online presence where we could talk about it with an audience, and ideally, get them to contribute. It could become a community for the jobless.
We saw nothing else quite like it online, and we knew there would be no shortage of potential visitors. Last year, over two million Americans were made redundant. Unfortunately, 2009 isn’t looking much better.
So we set up our blog and began to write. We wrote about filing for unemployment insurance benefits, about facing friends and family after a layoff and about identity crises. Our site quickly took shape as a place to explore issues of unemployment from the perspective of 20- and 30-somethings – this was not hard news, but rather a light-hearted, often humorous, self-deprecating look at a not-so-funny issue.
With so much doom and gloom coming from other media outlets, it made sense to try and keep it light. Plus, we are a generation of spoiled brats. We knew we weren’t in any danger of becoming homeless as a result of our layoff, so we felt it was inappropriate to paint a picture of any real tragedy. We were broke – not poor. For me anyway, this layoff was more a blow to my ego or a wrench in my long-term career goals than an impetus to poverty. Sure, my lifestyle would have to change. But sacrificing HBO and sacrificing food are two very different things. We make no pre-tense of believing otherwise.
And so far, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Our site might have been a place visited only by friends and family who were guilt-tripped into reading it, had it not been for pure, dumb luck.
To make our site prettier, we enlisted (read: begged) a photographer friend of ours to take some pictures of us downtown, which we would use for our site banner. But as we stood on Market Street holding cardboard signs, a complete stranger took an abnormal interest in us. As it turns out, he was a Reuters photographer walking around the streets of San Francisco, looking “for signs of the times”.
He, apparently, had just hit the jackpot. Two young people proclaiming their unemploymentality, holding a cardboard sign that read: “Will blog for food” – a very symbolic image for America’s tech hub, which is being hit hard by this recession.
Within hours, we were everywhere. Our photo made various “Photo of the Day” slide shows, including the one by Reuters and Times Online UK. We were being reported on in major media outlets in places like Korea, India and Germany. Overnight, hits on our site went from a few dozen to several thousand. One day, we even climbed up to over 9,000 views – pretty good for a week-old blog. Not only were people reading, commenting, and emailing us feedback, but they were also asking to contribute their own layoff stories.
Two months later, our blog continues to thrive. Sure, we’ve seen a dip in our numbers here and there, but we are slowly building a following. The Reuters photo has become a stock image, used often to illustrate bleak unemployment reports – of which, there have unfortunately been many. Just last week we were in the Boston Globe as job loss numbers for December 2008 were released, proving grimmer than the month prior.
The future remains uncertain. Not just for John and I, but for America as a whole. We look forward to Barack Obama’s term, and hope that his presidency will signify a major shift in direction for our country, not least of which being a swift economic recovery.
What will happen with Unemploymentality? We don’t know. We, of course, do not wish for it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby we remain unemployed simply for the sake of maintaining the blog. We do hope, however, that it will grow and become a collaboration of many writers, incorporating viewpoints beyond our own. The point is to create a widespread community, so that if and when we do find gainful employment, the site can essentially sustain itself.
For me, the experience of creating this blog has been somewhat life-changing. It has given me a newfound confidence, provided a platform for my writing, and taught me a new, more technical skill set. It has even led to a few potential job opportunities, even if they are short-term or freelance.
A person can only look for a job for so many hours in a day, without completely losing their mind. Using the rest of the time to do something creative, something productive, something other than watching ‘Days Of Our Lives’, is the
key to surviving a layoff, sanity in tact.
When we come out of this recession (and we inevitably will), I know I’ll have learned a very valuable lesson. Next time around, I’ll be better prepared. I won’t consider myself immune to national or global economic crises. I’ll save up for a rainy day. I won’t dillydally when the time comes to file for unemployment benefits.
At the very least, I will know exactly how to create an online platform to complain about it.
n Tania Khadder was a journalist at the Cyprus Mail from 2003-2005. Her blog can be found at http://unemploymentality.com
