Morale was low, and geeks with low morale only ever think about World of War­craft. That is, except for myself. I, of course, was spend­ing my time think­ing of ways to be a bet­ter almost-husband. It was Mon­day, Decem­ber 3^rd, and I got into the office a lit­tle late. The drive to Sioux Falls was get­ting worse and worse, and I was despis­ing the job more and more. And yet, I was loyal. I was set­ting my stuff down when Mike walked in.

“You’re late, so you’re fired,” he mused, humor­lessly, as he entered the room. I knew by the tone of his voice that he was seri­ous. When Mike has par­tic­u­larly bad news, he tends to break it with a shock­ing pseudo-joke which he fol­lows up with a “No, really.” state­ment. He’s always had a way with eas­ing into bad news.

The Sioux Falls branch of The CERTUS Com­pany (hereby dubbed Cer­tas­tro­phe) was being shut down, and we had all been laid off. This five-man mas­sacre was fol­low­ing hot on the heels of a four-man culling that took place a cou­ple months ear­lier. What it meant for the other branches of the com­pany, and John Web­ster, him­self, I knew not. Nor did I care. Look­ing around the room, no one looked sur­prised, but no one looked happy either.

I put every­thing that I’d brought or owned into a plas­tic bag, for­get­ting some things I had in the fridge, and I drove all the way back to Madi­son. It was a long trip. The first thing that hap­pens when you lose your job is that every­one you tell apol­o­gizes for not know­ing of any job open­ings or they give you advice. Which is nice if it’s your first unem­ploy­ment (like mine) but would prob­a­bly get old if I keep los­ing my job.

I did try get­ting unem­ploy­ment insur­ance ben­e­fits, but that was a fiasco. I tried using the dra­con­ian web­site, cre­ated strictly for use with Win­dows and Inter­net Explorer, and when I got all done with it, it didn’t work. Instead of allow­ing me to resub­mit the form to cor­rect errors, they instead chose to mail me the prob­lems and ask me to mail back the cor­rec­tions. On top of that, I acci­den­tally put my gen­der down as female. So, I hate unem­ploy­ment insur­ance, and I never did get any money from the government.

I did finally get moti­vated to make a resume web­site, the design of which I’ve since become ashamed of, but the struc­ture of which I’m very proud of. I’ll let you know how the job search is going later.