Gather round and attend my layoff time tale of woe.

I worked for this company for four years. They fell on hard times and, in place of layoffs, required employees to temporarily give up a portion of their salary on the condition it would be repaid within 2 years with interest, plus increased bonuses proportional with how much you sacrificed. I voluntarily gave up 20% as the company had never had a layoff in its history (no layoffs was part of their alleged culture) and all the old timers gushed about their massive bonuses after downturns like these.

I was given my quarterly review in October and I get a perfect score. I work three weeks, then am badly hurt on the job. It requires fairly major surgery, so I’m out for almost two months.

I literally limp back, probably a little too early. The first day is fine and I’m getting back up to speed. Boss shows appreciation to my dedication as I reasonably could have taken more time to recuperate. I tell her I need to discuss accommodations as I’m still healing. She agrees and sets an appointment for the next morning. Great job HamSandwich, everyone loves you.

I arrive to the accommodation meeting to find the head of HR and my boss. I figure HR is there to help with accomodations. Nope, I’m being terminated. For performance. Huh. I ask about my stellar review. My boss tells me there were issues. I ask about the issues. She is unable to give me any examples. I ask how I was supposed to know I had performance issues when I had a perfect review three work weeks ago and no one can tell me what I’ve been doing wrong. HR boss bitch pipes in with “Ham, at your seniority level you should just know.” Fuck you, boss bitch. Fuck you.

As I’m packing up my things, I realize they cut me one day before my yearly stock shares were to be awarded. Security walks me out and tells me I’m one of many senior level employees being terminated. People are being fired for showing up five minutes late. Upper level admins are walking out in protest. It appears this was the strategy: bank on the company’s good reputation to encourage increased voluntary salary cuts, then dump as many high earners as possible if still in a downturn. My boss is a spineless twerp and went along with it. She lies and tells the rest of the department I was terminated for sleeping on the job. Fuck you, boss. Fuck you.

The company had its first round of layoffs a few months later. Those employees also lost the money they gave up. The company’s reputation is irreparably harmed and I’m currently suing them for lost wages.

I remember years and years ago when I still a regular employee I got into work one morning to find I no longer had access to any git repos. nothing. Well already knew the reason right then and there. I usually got in before everyone else so by the time people were coming into the office I was packing my stuff up to leave. People were all “where are you going?” I said “well I either got fired or laid off so I’m leaving, I’m not sitting through a bullshit meeting telling me why I was laid off”

wiped the laptop, wiped my externals, walked out, went and sat in a coffee shop to revise my resume. I got a call like an hour later asking me where I was and why I didn’t attend the meeting I was apparently schedule for. I replied with “you laid me off” few minutes later they email me back saying they’ll just send my ROE and last paycheque in the mail and then proceeded to explain why I and a few other devs were laid off. I didn’t bother reading the rest of it.

Then I decided to become a freelancer and never looked back. best decision I made.

What REALLY annoyed me about the whole thing was I thought I was good friends with the IT guy that set up access to everything, he was the one that revoked my access the night before and didn’t tell me. I was literally having a beer with him that night and he never said a word. out of everything that hurt the most. never spoke to him again.

Being sarcastic got me fired. Twice.

Where the fuck do y’all work that your HR “rep” looks like Anne Hathaway? Every company I worked for had a lady that looked like she retired after thirty years of proctoring detentions at a public highschool.

“oh I’m sorry, I had to leave early. Something’s come up. You’ll receive FMLA paperwork soon; I’m afraid I have to invoke mandatory legally protected family medical leave. See you in at least 90 days”

Oh. I heard this bluff from Pat Geisinger himself, in person.

I was employed by VMware many moons ago when Pat took the helm. He decided to start by cutting an entire department from my location, sight unseen.

We then changed all the furniture because they had two floors of the building and wanted to cut back since they just lost half a floor of people.

We go home, work from home for a while, then return. Then Pat comes by for a site visit.

He stood there with the gall to say that the team that was cut was a different business unit, and that was a business decision regarding that business unit (it was the front line team, which was then relocated to “low cost centers”)… Blah blah blah… This is a different department, a different business unit, blah blah, what happened to them is isolated, and doesn’t mean anything regarding your employment… Blah blah …

I didn’t buy it for a second. But I was too stressed out to do anything at the time.

The layoffs started less than six months later. I was part of the first round.

Fuck you Pat.

MegaBux Inc. bought our small ag-biotech firm in 2018. I had developed a high throughput product screening system for natural products against a bunch of animal diseases. The program worked and we identified a bunch of candidates (I also developed the list of things to screen) for botanical/natural solutions to animal diseases. I should have guessed that I was on the chopping block when after finding out some of the things we screened actually worked, I got replaced as PI on the project by someone else much younger. A couple months into 2020 all the folks at the R&D center (including me) got laid off. They did pay severance to us- and mine took me out to October of that year due to my longevity with the firm that was purchased. A couple months after that, a bunch of the junior staff (who were well trained in my methods) got hired back. I was almost 69 at the time, so it was probably time to retire anyway. I was very lucky. This is so familiar! At least I made my stack and can live comfortably on my SS and pensions.

Sorry, too busy. Why can’t my manager fill you in on my current projects?

Brb, backing up my script folder and deleting anything I haven’t already shared with the team

HR lady once spit a whole ass pack of lies about my work performance, and had cut off my email access so I couldn’t prove her wrong, which would have been trivially easy. Realized before I spoke up that if the HR director is lying this bad, there’s no reason to even try to “prove” I’m right, just a really toxic company.

That smile. That damned smile.

I think this is their mask.

In my previous company, at about 9PM, about half the company got an invite for a 9AM meeting, and the other half for a 10AM meeting, we saw all the name in our invite of course. Let’s say the evening was hard, to guess which group was staying and which group was fired! I was in the “stay” group, this repeated every quarter and after 3 or 4 quarters it was my turn to be in the fire group, the next quarter they closed the company and fired the remaining employees.

The HR lady was like the picture.

Lmao in my case my computer just randomly restarted and asked for a security pin while I was busy working on something. I learned through our WhatsApp group that we got laid off lol.

Call with HR was when I already knew and nothing like this, I tried to get them to let me keep my $7k MacBook, no chance, literally everything was non negotiable so the call was absolutely pointless.

The only good thing about getting laid off is 1) you can at least collect unemployment 2) It’s easier to get another job because you weren’t simply fired

Sending Anne Hathaway to fire me? I’ll accept that.