Starting Over Again

For the third time in my life I find myself unemployed.  What a drag!  Everything was going fine Friday morning and my boss said our GM wanted us to come over to his office to talk.  At first I thought it was going to be some sort of a management/production kind of meeting, maybe some sort of a trip to a customer.  When we got over there, I was planning on going into the conference room, but the supervisor asked the receptionist if we were going upstairs to the conference room and she said, no you can just go in there (the HR office).  

At first I wasn't sure why we would be going into the HR office, but then I thought, it was going to be good news.  At our daily production review meetings, the receptionist (who is the acting HR officer since our HR manager had left last fall) had said something to the departmental supervisors about getting their appraisals in, meaning performance appraisals.  I had been there not quite a year and a half and had never had a performance review/evaluation, nor a raise.  When I was hired they had agreed to bump my pay after my probationary period was over as long as I was working out.  At that time they said, "unfortunately due to the state of the company they couldn't offer me a raise at the time, but we would revisit it in a few months".  OK, fine, right?  Well I am thinking great, I am going to have a review and get the raise I was promised almost a year ago.  Oh, and I was supposed to have my title upgraded to Quality Engineer.  I was doing QE work and had the same responsibilities as a Quality Engineer, but it was explained to me that due to the coprorate structure, they were only "allowed" so many Engineer titles.  The Quality Manager that hired me was going to be retiring, and when he did, the other QE would become the departmental manager, and I would be bumped up to get the Engineer title.  So this is what I was thinking was going to be happening.  I couldn't have been more wrong.

The GM walks in and says, "ah, it's never good being called into the HR office on a Friday".  I thought he was making a joke until he said, "due to declining sales figures the company needs to make cutbacks to make up for the lost revenue, so unfortunately we'll be laying you off indefinitely".  I think my jaw hit the floor.  I was speechless. (I blame Obama for killing the mining industry). So then I spent the rest of the morning getting my desk packed up and making sure all the information on things was transferred to someone else or they knew where certain things were stored.

So now it is on to the next chapter.  But I have to say, it's getting old.  Hopefully it won't take long to find something else.