Death of a Good Job
The first issue of Homesick will arrive in email inboxes later this month. It was supposed to be sooner. But life has been busier than expected as of late. (It turns out quitting your job to start work as an independent writer and editor, while exciting, is also fairly all-consuming.) In the meantime, this essay is the third in a series of posts for early subscribers. If you can afford to purchase a subscription, I hope you will. Your contribution keeps the lights on.
I.
When we drove out of the mountains that morning it was hot, the sun climbing higher in the sky as our car barreled down a neck of Lincoln Highway woven like thread through Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands. Ethan was in his car seat, chatting away, my wife Michelle and I both quizzing him about our weekend stay in the mountains, often asking if we had seen a black bear while hiking two days earlier. “Yes we did!” he kept answering, a certain electricity in his words.
Our cabin that weekend was buried deep in Lin Run’s cool woods, beneath a canopy of tall, prehistoric-looking trees. Cell towers sparsely dotted the mountain, like hair on an old man’s balding scalp, and my phone had no service until we hit the main road nearly 10 miles away. We were, however temporarily, out of reach. For four days I didn’t check email, either personal or work-related, and during that time I felt the muscles in my neck uncoil. The anxiety that normally hung in my chest like a lingering cold was gone.
Each night, after putting Ethan to sleep, Michelle and I stayed up late and talked and drank beer under clear black skies next to campfires built from wood we collected on hikes during the day. Against the pitch black quiet of the forest we laughed about things Ethan said at dinner and in the car; retraced our hikes and marveled at the family of foxes we had seen and how they scared the hell out of us; and remembered how cold the creek water was when we had kicked off our shoes and waded through. As the alcohol dulled my thoughts, I entertained the idea of selling our house and buying a cabin, living away from everything and everybody. I could get a job at the cement factory I saw during our drive up, pay the remainder of our bills selling junk and old toys on eBay. It was a terrible plan. I half-heartedly thumbed through the real estate guide that I picked up at the grocery store, the same one I later tossed in the fire.
On our last night, we talked mostly about the future. With Ethan’s third birthday a month and a half away, we discussed wanting a bigger family, and how Ethan would make a great big brother.
This was, however, a precarious topic. Ethan’s entry into the world had been marked by a two-week stint in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Pittsburgh’s Allegheny General Hospital.
Born six weeks early, Ethan still needed time for his lungs to fully develop after delivery. As soon as he was born the nurses had to take him away in an incubator, drain the fluid from his lungs to help him breathe better, and keep him under close observation. After waiting nine months to see and hold our son, we waited some more.
Since he shared the NICU with a dozen other babies facing equal or far greater challenges, visiting hours were limited to once every two hours for 20 minutes. We had to scrub in and scrub out each time we saw him. Only two people could visit at a time. So Michelle and I took turns escorting our family in and out to meet him. Depending on how well he was doing, we often just got to hold his finger through the opening in the incubator. We never got to hold him—post delivery—in that euphoric moment you see in old Merry Melodies cartoons, where the father runs around plugging cigars into his friends’ mouths while the mother presents the new baby to the gathered crowd.
On that Monday in June of 2009, however, as we left our mountain cabin—nearly three years since Ethan’s premature birth—we resigned that we would somehow make it work, no matter how unstable the economy or how fragile our introduction to parenthood had been. Then, as we wound on the highway, my cell service returned. Voicemail notifications began chiming on my phone. I handed it to Michelle so she could listen while I continued talking to Ethan about our adventures.
“It’s someone named Tom from your work,” Michelle said. “He needs to talk with you as soon as possible.” I looked at her blankly for a moment then realized who had called. It was the director of publications at the nonprofit where I worked.
Before I left the magazine offices for the weekend, our editorial director—a man we’ll call Kevin—asked me if I could come in a for a post-training meeting that Monday. The magazine staff had recently been quarantined for days in training sessions concocted by a consulting firm hired to help the organization through the economic crisis (our portion dealt with improving “content delivery” for our customers, and made me wish I was anywhere else in the world). When I told Kevin I had my vacation planned, he seemed insistent that I attend. After informing him again that I wouldn’t be available, we decided a phone call would work if the staff needed me. “We’ll just call you if we have any questions,” Kevin said.
I decided to pull into the parking lot of a roadside antique shop so that I could get out of the car and return Tom’s call. The first time I called, his phone went straight to voicemail. I left a message. A couple minutes later my phone rang. It was Tom. He asked me how I was doing then apologized for interrupting my vacation. He then launched into a monologue about the state of the magazine industry, followed by another monologue about the challenges currently facing the auto industry (note: the organization where I worked as a staff writer and editor reported on the auto industry in its publications). My stomach dropped. I was certain I knew where the phone call was headed. And then, after nearly five minutes of talking, he unveiled the reason for his call: “I’m sorry to inform you that you got caught up in this latest round of workforce reductions. But I want you to understand this has nothing to do with your performance.”
You no longer have the means to support your family is what I heard instead.
A sense of panic welled as Tom continued, HR-speak spilling from his mouth, repeating phrases like “skill set” and “moving forward” until I eventually tuned him out. I felt lightheaded. I had spent the last five years of my life toiling away in a cubicle at this job, working long hours each week writing and editing copy that was often so dull I wished someone would run into my office and punch me in the stomach just to break the monotony.
At my job, I played the part of a reluctant office drone. I endured meetings that never solved a thing and adhered to corporate procedures that always seemed to make the job harder. I commuted 75 miles each day, five days a week. Dressed in business casual. Chipped in for co-workers’ birthday lunches at the Olive Garden. Aspired to promotions that were dangled like carrots. All in exchange for a salary and benefits, a means of survival. I did it for love, for my family, for our happiness. But it always felt like I had traded my soul to sustain our life. I hated my job, and in recent years my self-loathing had become unbearable.
“Sandi from HR will be calling you after we hang up,” Tom continued. “She’ll go over COBRA and severance information, and any other questions you have.” Then, as a final pleasantry, he told me I could call him if I had any questions. I got the sense he was attempting compassion, but by that point all I wanted to do was fight him. Punching him in the mouth would only have temporarily eased my frustration. Pissing on his cowboy boots—the pair he proudly wore to work each casual Friday—would have been more therapeutic. A bag of sugar poured into the gas tank of his Indian motorcycle, the fresh-out-of-the-showroom model parked out in the employee lot, would have been ideal.
When I looked over my shoulder at our car idling in the gravel lot, Michelle had the back door propped open. She was entertaining Ethan who was still planted in his car seat. She smiled when I looked her way. I thought about the conversation we had the night before, how hopeful we both were about the future. And then I thought about how everything had just changed.
II.
When I arrived that next morning the magazine offices were nearly vacant. Nothing but the dull hum of a thousand overhead florescent lights and the distant clicking of a few phantom keyboards registered a sound. A stack of empty boxes had been left on my desk. Looking at them, they seemed to tell the true story of the last 24 hours: We care, we really do. But please take your belongings and leave. It’s time for us to move on. I looked at the boxes, then over at the woman from Human Resources who had escorted me from the entrance of the building to my cubicle. “Take all the time you need,” she said. “I’ll check back with you in 10 minutes.”
Since receiving the call the day before, the one informing me that I no longer had a job, it had been impossible to think about anything else. It was like a bolt of lightning had come down from the sky and struck the ground next to my feet, barely missing me—it was instant terror, followed by overwhelming relief. I had no job. But I had also shed the weight of a job I had come to hate. And the pressing questions quickly became: How do I survive? How does my family survive?
Our drive out of the Laurel Mountains the day before had been quiet at first. Then Michelle began to cry. Seeing her so upset about the uncertainty of our new situation devastated me. I had no soothing words to offer, none at least that felt genuine. “Everything will be okay,” I repeated, like some useless refrain. But I was so unsure that I could barely convince myself. Several miles into our drive, I asked if she could please stop crying. “It’s killing me,” I said. It was selfish of me to ask that. Michelle had always been strong, often propping me up at my most difficult times. When she looked over at me, her eyes were swollen and red. But she seemed to understand. I felt terrible. I looked at Ethan in the rearview mirror. “You okay, Bug?” He nodded and smiled, eyes fixed on the screen of his DVD player.
After getting off the phone with Tom—the man who delivered the news of my layoff as if he were reading aloud the instructions on how to operate a microwave oven—the woman from Human Resources called to discuss the “outplacement package” that was being overnighted to my house. She then asked if I could come in and clean out my office by “close of business” that day—returning to her my corporate cellphone, laptop, and security key. At first, and in my usual fashion, I attempted to accommodate her: “I guess I could get there by 5 p.m., if I hurry. How late will you be there? Maybe I could just drive straight there without dropping off my wife and son.” Then I stopped. Why am I eager to accommodate this woman? I thought. So instead I told her I couldn’t get there by the close of business. She would have to wait until tomorrow.
We decided to meet at 7 a.m. the next morning, outside the visitor entrance at corporate headquarters. During our brief phone conversation, this woman attempted compassion, but it sounded like she was tutoring a World War II veteran on how to use an iPod, her words deliberate and overcooked: “IF YOU, AT ANY TIME, HAVE QUESTIONS OR CONCERNS, MY PHONE NUMBER IS INCLUDED IN THE PACKET. PLEASE DON’T HESITATE TO CALL”
It turned out 30 employees were let go that day. Back in March, 30 others were let go. And before that, 25 were laid off. “All difficult but necessary actions” we were told in a group staff meeting following the first cuts. Then the company stopped convening staff meetings to talk about its problems. With its fate so intertwined with that of an automotive industry in turmoil, everyone feared their jobs would be next. And as the company thinned out, clusters of workers were seen crying or whispering to one another about all the changes. I would hear about certain people who were let go, people I knew. But I never recognized all the names. After awhile though, I stopped seeing certain familiar faces in the halls and realized there were many people I would not see again. And now I was one of them, reduced to another name whispered among co-workers.
When I woke that morning, it felt like I never slept. The alarm clock on my nightstand began chirping at 6 a.m. I silenced it with a smack from my hand before slowly getting out of bed. Dull gray Pittsburgh sunlight broke through the wooden shutters in my bedroom. Exhausted from the nonstop rush of adrenaline the last day, my bones and muscles ached. My spine and shoulders were tight again. All the good of my family’s mountain escape erased with a single phone call.
The woman from Human Resources met me at 7 a.m. as promised. Before she motioned me inside, I watched the organization’s CEO park his Cadillac then silently walk past me—like he was ignoring a panhandler. The sight of him made me want to swing the edge of my laptop into his face, send an explosion of broken teeth to the sidewalk. But instead I just stared at him as he averted his gaze.
Within minutes, the boxes laid out on my desk were nearly full. On the drive in, speeding across the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I had mapped out just how I would empty my office. What would be thrown away and what would be saved. I would gather my things, I decided, then say my goodbyes and vanish. I wanted to be a ghost in that building. Seep in like smoke then disappear forever. As I was cleaning out my office, there was a knock at the door. When I looked up from my desk, Pat, one of my co-workers, was standing there, shaking his head.
“Maaaatt…” he said, the lonely vowel in my name hanging in the air for an eternity. “I don’t know what to say.”
I smiled at him, kept my comments to myself.
“There’s really nothing to say,” I replied. He told me it had been a pleasure working together. I said the same. We shook hands and said goodbye.
Little from cubicle was worth saving it turned out. The tangle of lanyards from press trips and trade shows were first to hit the trash. Then came an avalanche of papers—old press releases, notes from staff meetings, and time sheets collected for the last five years. All meaningless. I filled the large trashcan in my office, then another outside my door next to the copier. My only hesitation came when I caught sight of the Peace Lily next to my window.
The lily had been a gift from my parents, who surprised me with a visit during my first week on the job. Proud of my new position they walked in with the plant, smiling the way parents do when they are innately happy about the success of their child. The wicker planter had a blue celebratory ribbon woven around its midsection. For five years I kept that plant alive. Even as pressing deadlines and a daunting workload kept me busy. For weeks on end I would forget to give it water, then its brown curling leaves reminded me of my neglect. Then I would make up for it, trimming the browned leaves, watering it regularly, twisting it daily so all its leaves could warm in the sun. Then I would forget again. It’s as if the plant were a biological monitor of my indifference toward my job. I would try hard to care, pretend I was a career man who didn’t dread staff meetings, corporate Christmas parties, or all-day training sessions. But no matter how hard I tried to convince myself that things weren’t all that bad, the space between the start and end of each work day always felt like a waste of time.
The Peace Lily ended up surviving a few days longer than I did. On my way out, I dropped it in the overflowing trashcan next to the copier, loose dirt and leaves falling to the industrial-grade carpet.
Two small boxes and four framed pieces of art were all that remained. Looking at my empty cubicle, I wanted to burn it to the ground. Soak the carpeted walls in gasoline and light a match. Watch the smoke billow down the hall, blackening ceiling tiles as the fire searched for more fuel. File folders. Pencils. Pens. Magazines. All devoured. All consumed. All destroyed. But of course I didn’t. Instead, all that weird anger just festered and I awkwardly gathered my things. I made two trips to my car and back, Human Resources tight on my heels.
Out in the parking lot, the woman from Human Resources awkwardly smiled as she sent me on my way. I closed the door of my car and sat behind the steering wheel for a moment. Kevin, my manager for five years and editorial director at the organization, never said a word to me. No goodbye. No handshake. No apology. No compassion. Nothing. It felt like he was already trying to forget me. His lack of basic human respect toward me was the final humiliation. Not only had I lost the means to support my family, my former boss almost immediately tried to pretend I didn’t exist.
Losing my job was bad. But having my boss disregard the situation, as if it were just some inconsequential incident, left me dejected. I wish I could say I peeled out of that parking lot with my radio cranked and my middle finger in the air. But of course that didn’t happen. Instead I quietly pulled away in my nondescript family sedan, boxes from my office cradled in my son’s empty car seat, feeling worse than I had in a long time.
During the years that I spent at that job I played a ridiculous game. I tried to convince myself that I went to the office each day for a reason other than survival. That I was working toward some nebulous goal of creative freedom. That the paycheck I worked for was nothing more than life support for my long-term plans. It was at night, when I should have been sleeping, that I invested in my own ideas—writing magazine articles and transcribing interviews; laying out and assembling zines; curating art exhibitions; and writing music. These were the things that I deemed important and worthwhile.
But when it all ended so abruptly it felt like the last five years had never happened. What I convinced myself of for all those years was that I would someday be able to leave and pursue a serious writing career. That this job I came to detest, working as an editor at a trade publication, was transitional. And when the time came, I would be the one to quit.
As I exited the Turnpike on my way home that morning, I pulled into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. It’s where I worked one of my first jobs during high school, washing dishes in the kitchen of a karaoke bar called The Cheatin’ Heart Saloon. Back then the place was a cesspool of disenfranchised suburbanites—drunks singing Garth Brooks and Clint Black songs into a beer-soaked microphone; men and women dressed in their best acid-washed denim purchased at the local mall; a revolving door of belligerent alcoholics; and terrible food prepared by a revolving cast of down-on-their-luck cooks. It was a much-needed dose of reality in an era of my life deeply marred by depression. It made me appreciate what I had, however fucked up it all seemed. So it felt fitting to return and toast my first day of unemployment with a shot of whiskey and a beer.
To be sitting in that parking lot 15 years later, a husband and a father, and absolutely jobless, was unsettling. But still I felt strangely happy. I was free from the maddening hassle of work, if only for a brief moment. I looked over at the box of framed photos from my office and saw Ethan’s black and white photo from his first birthday. It’s the one where his hair just started to grow out. His smile is electric and his blue eyes are piercing, even without color. He is happy, healthy, and beautiful. And it reminds me of the birthday wish I have made every year for as long as I can remember—the phrase that repeats in my head as I blow out the growing number of candles covering the top of each year’s cake: I hope everything works out.
III.
We left Pittsburgh on a cold Thursday morning in mid-October, driving southwest through Ohio toward Cincinnati. The sky was doused in shades of soot and ash, and all around us stood the evidence of America’s boom and bust—shopping malls built to the scale of small cities and the glowing lights of fast food chains strung like party decorations along the interstate; empty steel mills with furnaces that had long gone cold and manufacturing plants crumbling from neglect. That strange, depressive landscape was everything I had ever known, from my time as an infant to that very moment 32 years later racing away from it all. Through the rain I fixed my eyes on the highway’s dividing line, then further beyond to the horizon. Music played on the radio, songs with names I can’t recall.
It was dark by the time we crossed the Kentucky border, our car almost out of gas. At the pump I swiped my credit card and tapped on the car’s back window. Ethan smiled at me from his seat, holding up a small Thor figure in one hand and Doctor Doom in the other. I pressed my face against the glass and made a farting sound with my mouth. He laughed then screamed “Again!” Michelle looked over her shoulder at us and smiled, then back at the glowing screen of the GPS. We were headed for Lexington, but had settled on staying at any motel we could find within 20 miles or so of the city. It was raining and had been for most of the day. I bounced from one foot to the other attempting to keep warm as I waited for the tank to fill. I wanted back in the car, and I wanted to find a place for us to sleep.
It had been five months since I lost my job, since going from being an editor at a nonprofit organization to becoming one of the thousands of Americans without work. It was not a situation I was prepared for. In fact, it felt like I was imploding.
After the initial embarrassment of losing my job had faded, all I had left was vast reserves of anger. So much that I sometimes caught myself in the midst of fantasies that had me pouring sugar into the gas tank of my former boss’s exotic sports car, or sending “All Staff” emails to my former co-workers and planting insidious doubts regarding how they each felt about one another.
Of course I never acted on these fantasies, usually the loud gnashing of my teeth and throbbing hurt in my jaw brought me back to reality. Zoned out on revenge scenarios and obsessive self-analysis, I exhausted myself more each day. The intensity of my anger weighed a ton.
I was angry at the way the news had been delivered by phone while I was on vacation; at how my employer gave me no warning, and worse, no sensible explanation for why I no longer had a job; and I was angry at being so upset over losing a job I had convinced myself I never cared about—a job that I was too good for and that only served as a necessary tool for survival. Or at least, that’s what I told myself. And even though I grew to despise the monotonous drone of sedentary office life, I never allowed that to alter my work ethic. I went in, worked hard, and earnestly contributed my time and thoughts in an effort to improve the work of an organization that later disposed of me like outdated equipment. The more I attempted to make sense of my situation, the more it confounded me. I had taken my dismissal personally, and spent too much time obsessing over it.
None of the circumstances surrounding my layoff mattered any longer. But it took time for me to understand that and shake off the damage it had done to my ego. No matter how much I felt defined by my work, it was time to forget about my former employer and worry about the future. Nobody else was weeping for me, and I needed to start making money.
My unemployment checks covered our mortgage and car payment, but left little money to survive beyond that. When you have half the money you used to, it makes you learn how much you needed it (and sometimes squandered it). Groceries and diapers are only willingly handed over in exchange for cash; electricity and gasoline are not doled out as tokens of goodwill. Freelance and under-the-table work helped supplement what was lost, but the struggle to be paid by magazines and websites was maddening, and did little to soothe my anger. Promises of payment that never materialized and offers to be compensated with t-shirts, stickers, and free music held no weight with me. Reality proved that there was no place for idealistic pursuits—I’ll write an album review, that’ll save us!—when scrambling to claim money that was already so scarce.
Weeks passed, then months, and during that time I adjusted to unemployment with the ease of a retiree who can’t sit still. It was the first time since turning 16 that I didn’t have a job, and being home during the day felt alien to me.
In high school, my first job was working as a bus boy at a local family restaurant followed by a short stint stocking coffee and toilet paper on the night shift at a local grocery store chain; then onto a two-day career washing dishes at a local Italian restaurant and a single day at Toys “R” Us (i.e., orientation video, then out the door). Next came a several-month run as the night-time dishwasher at the Holiday Inn near an exit on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a job that ended when I called in and quit from a payphone at the Boyce Park Wave Pool (I want to keep swimming!). After that I entered college and started working as a stock clerk at Sears, Roebuck and Co. (which paid a percentage of my college tuition through a reimbursement program, so I stayed), where I worked full time while taking a full-time class load at the University of Pittsburgh. After graduation, I became an editorial coordinator at an international medical journal, and settled in to my first desk, which led to a string of editorial jobs over the next seven years that ended with me standing in the Laurel Mountains with a cell phone pressed to my ear listening to a man named Tom tell me he was taking away my desk and my paycheck. My layoff punctuated a 16-year succession of jobs that meant nothing to me, a demoralizing conclusion that, if I hadn’t already exhausted myself with end-to-end self-imposed breakdowns, would have sent me plunging even deeper into depression.
The absence of that desk should have marked the end of a contentious personal burden. And for a few months it did.
Summer was the perfect time to be unemployed. Ethan and I went to the park most days and played; escaped to the local pool when it got too hot and went swimming for the afternoon; ate more picnic lunches in open fields of warm grass than I had my whole life. It was uninterrupted joy with my son like I had never experienced, something that was rare when I worked. I saw friends more often and drank beer and laughed and remembered what life used to be like. Michelle and I dropped Ethan at his grandparents and took day trips like we did before becoming parents, like the days when we first met. It was flawless for a short stretch of time. But the end was inevitable. The flood of resumes and cover letters exiting my house soon led to a change.
My unemployment ended fives months after it began. It concluded with a phone call and a new opportunity, one that looked strangely similar to the one I had left behind. There was a desk and an office and the promise of untold hours spent hunched forward at a keyboard, eyes weighed down with fatigue and the familiar retinal burn of too much time spent staring at thousands of words on a screen. It would keep me in Pittsburgh, my hometown since birth, and a city I had come to begrudgingly enjoy. No other job opportunities offered that summer appealed to me. Each one brought with it mountains of potential bullshit that I had no interest in taking on. So until that moment I remained selective and unemployed. And in truth, the opportunity I chose— an uneventful return to sedentary work as an editor—lacked much of what I wanted in a job. But it made enough sense that it would work, at least for a certain period of time. And it would allow my family to feel somewhat stable again—something I needed with a second son soon to be born.
We planned a road trip south before my return to work. We would head for Kentucky then down to Tennessee to explore the Great Smoky Mountains before cutting further west to Nashville. We planned to expose Ethan to new places and talked of the trip as a proper sendoff to my unemployment. Nothing about the future felt perfect. But that was often my problem, searching for perfection in a world without it.
IV.
We stopped outside of Lexington at a Motel 6 off the interstate. It was late, close to midnight, and the motel stood between a Days Inn and a Waffle House, the latter bathed in fluorescent lights and yellow Formica and devoid of nearly any customers. Out front a dark state road snaked up and over a nearby hill, the twisting asphalt disappearing into oblivion. Across the interstate was a vacant mom and pop motel that we drove past when we first got off the exit. It looked like it had been empty forever, a faded monument left to mark the gateway to the Middle of Nowhere.
The Motel 6 lacked the roadside charm I envisioned when we first talked of our road trip south. But it would have to do for the night. We signed in at the front desk and I carried Ethan upstairs to our room, his tired body slumped into mine as I cradled him in my arms. His head heavy against my shoulder, he smelled sweet like apple juice and his breathing turned calm and rhythmic. I fumbled with the card key for the room and gently pushed open the heavy fireproof door with my foot. I laid him in one of the beds and covered him with his green and white elephant blanket, tucking in a sideshow of stuffed animals beside him. I searched for an electrical outlet to plug in his dream machine, and turned on the sound of rain (his favorite).
As I fell asleep that night, I imagined the days ahead of us. Driving long distances, it seemed, was the only form of meditation I’d ever known. I anticipated the miles spent driving through small towns and staring at unfamiliar land stretched out in front and all around us. I wondered about the people we would meet and the lives that they lived; about the schools their children attended and the jobs that they worked; about the wonderful and terrible things that they did in their lives. I wondered what it would be like to live in Lexington or Knoxville or Nashville, and how different that would be from the life I knew. And I wondered how my life might be different if I lived somewhere else, somewhere far from the familiar place that I had never left behind.
This essay is adapted from Death of a Good Job: A Memoir of the Great Recession, an ebook that was originally published in 2013. To lean more about the project, you can visit my website.