laid-off

i woke up early on august 6th, as i did on every day i went into the office recently. three or four days per week i had been working from home and on those days, i could sleep until as late as 7am, but when i went into the office, a 50 mile drive for me one way, i was up around 5am to arrive at the office before 7am.

i arrived in the office at 6:40am on this day, having consumed my coffee and breakfast bar on the road. i had an uneasy feeling however. recently i had not been as busy as i once had. at the end of 2007 i had worked 10 hour days as a norm. from the time the school year started in august, right through the beginning of december, i had just been slammed, handling virtually all of our customers in the state of texas.

for the last 8-10 weeks, however, i had been less than busy. the company was failing and the signs were everywhere. people got laid off. others went on indefinite sabbatical. the direction we were moving in was murky to say the least and plans changed almost as soon as they were put into effect.

two to three weeks earlier i attended a meeting in which my boss conveyed our new business plan to have all account managers go ahead and sell our product. any boundaries between account managers and salespeople were abolished and we were told compensation in the form of commission would be worked out. the important thing was for us to get busy trying to boost the organization's sales.

towards that end and because i had not been so busy recently, i developed a cold-calling script. i started making calls and working on plans to be systematic in my approach. as for my accounts, it was a low season. i had several customers with whom i had communicated and who planned on beginning the program in mid to late august as the school year commenced.

while i had some successes in my sales efforts, almost none of them were in terms of actual sales. (i had one or two small sales but those just landed in my lap.) still, i had laid groundwork and made some real inroads.

so i went to work that morning and made some calls early, before others arrived. (i worked in cramped quarters and preferred to make my calls prior to all the hubbub that occurred after our tutors arrived.) i exchanged emails with one of my customers from a tiny, texas town, who i had imposed upon a week or so earlier to take advantage of a special offer we were having at the end of july. as it turned out she explained via email she was not put off by my sales pitch whatsoever and in fact, she said she shared my passion for getting english language skills to people who needed them. she just could not take advantage of this offer at this time.

i was insecure about my work recently because i had not been so busy and because i had not yet had any luck selling. so to have this customer soothe me a bit and tell me that she appreciated me was nice.

around 11am my boss came in. it was her custom to work from home on wednesdays so this was unexpected but i was glad to see her because i had a couple of issues i wanted to speak to her about. however, she stalked around the office with her head down and i could tell she was not in a good mood. the signs were clear and i knew to avoid her when she was like this. someone tried to approach her and she brushed them off rudely, implying the importance of whatever task she was working on.

by 11am all of the tutors were in the office as well and one had returned a movie to me that i had loaned her, leonardo dicaprio's 11th hour. she and i had a brief chat about the movie, agreeing across the board on the overall value and the positive message at the end.

as i walked around the pods to return to my cubicle, my boss asked me if i could come into her office for a minute. i went to her straightaway but when she stood by her door and closed it behind me, i knew exactly what was happening.

as she closed the door she let me know that our h.r. manager was joining us by speaker phone and asked me to sit down. i could not help but chuckle. part of me wanted to rage but i knew there was no point. why burn bridges when a decision had been made? this decision was typical of the decisions the company had made of late.

so there it was; i was laid off. i was asked not to mention it to my fellow workers as i returned to my desk for whatever i needed to gather. my buddy asked me if i was ready to go to lunch in that moment but i lied and said i had lunch plans. i grabbed my few photos and almost nothing else.

i felt like jack nicholson in that movie where he is a retiring actuary and he comes to the realization that no one wants the files he has built and maintained for so many years. no one needs any sort of briefing from him before he leaves. whoever takes over his customers is just going to figure it out as they go and this approach will in fact be fine.

it will be fine in my situation as well. someone will have to figure it out and they will figure it out and my clients will not be incredibly put off though they may notice a sinking ship when they see one.

i fired off an email to my wife before i left letting her know i had been laid-off and she called me as i drove out of the parking lot. she asked if i was okay and i said i was. i was, too. i was determined to be positive about all of this.

that morning i had not known it was coming but i did know my company was floundering. i had thought recently about beginning a job search, which in retrospect i clearly should have done, but i felt like that would be a betrayal of the mission of my company to whatever degree.

i worked for a start-up company with about 25 employees. if nothing else there was a sense of mission there, a sense of camaraderie, and i had bought into the rhetoric of the ceo and the idea that if we worked hard we could in fact make a difference and turn the company around and become profitable and pay back our venture capital debtors. i believed those ground-floor shares i had would one day be worth something, even unto the end.

i did pristine work. i did the best i could with my accounts. my contacts were very happy with me and often made comments to my regional manager and to me to the effect of them feeling like they were my only account.

the thing was most of my accounts bought our product under a grant and so, they received everything at half price. my record at getting my customers to re-purchase our product or services at full price was not entirely good though some did and i managed a couple of the best accounts we had as an organization.

so did i feel snubbed and unappreciated when i was chosen to be laid-off while four others remained in my position? certainly. others were laid-off a few months before me, (as well as two others on the same day as me,) and i did not necessarily agree with those decisions either, though i did not voice my concerns. in any case, it is here and it is now and i am unemployed.

i'm scared. i do not have an undergraduate degree. i feel like my skills are soft skills, skills i have nurtured and developed but that are none the less nebulous by nature. i am what you would call a customer service professional. i know how to defuse potentially volatile situations. i have trained literally thousands of customer service representatives on how to empathize with others as well as a host of other soft skills. i was hired into the start-up company for these same soft skills. they wanted someone to manage a program remotely and ensure our customer contacts stayed 100% happy after their purchase.

i used to tell my classes when i trained virtually everyone in a 150+ seat call center that customer service skills would travel with them, which was to say, they would employ these skills in every job they would hold for the rest of their lives and even in their personal lives. so it is no wonder that i feel like virtually everyone does have these skills i have been refining these past 13 years and that these skills are undervalued.

it is important to me to do a good job at whatever i undertake. at times i need to focus on speed, which is to say i have to remind myself to work fast. quality on the other hand comes naturally to me. i always do good work and i am always thoughtful about it, considering everything to ensure my work is above reproach.

still, how am i going to get a job? i have heard it said that many hiring managers take a pile of resumes for a given position and pare it down first by making two piles. those candidates who have their undergraduate degree go in one pile while those without go in another, the pile that goes directly to the trash bin.

if i had my druthers i would find my way into a career writing but that is like a pipe dream to me. no, i have to conduct a job search for a customer service manager or call center position, knowing the lack of degree could mean i have to start significantly further back down the ladder from where i had recently been.

i remember 13 years ago when i started working for the home delivery water service company how i thought one way of covering up the lack of an undergrad degree would be to stay put. this is to say, if i stayed in this company, i believed i could rise, which i did. merit is merit after all, and so i thought i could move up and any boss who knew me and my work would recognize me as a better choice to promote than some college grad who might be brought in.

this is what happened, too. in my 12 years in that call center i went from making under $10 an hour part time to an annual salary of about $56k. i was rewarded for my hard work and insight with steady promotions, raises and new and interesting challenges.

after all that time, however, things changed and moving on from that company was in the best interests of myself and my family. i found the start-up company on monster.com and though they were a significant commute, they had one thing going for them no other companies i came across had, which was they offered me the job. i took it, perhaps too hastily but based on my need to make a move...

right now security is at a premium. looking past that fact, i still think i did the right thing. i needed to make a move, instead of stagnating where i was. still, right here, right now, i am worried.