No Job, Day One -- Giddy-up!

OK, so I got laid off from Indymac Bank. I can look at it one of two ways. The first way is that my boss really didn't like me. There is certainly anecdotal evidence for this assertion. In our first team meeting she chastised me for not contributing enough; in most subsequent meetings she told me I talked too much. This is only one example, but ask anyone in my group. There was a feeling that there was not much I could do to please my boss.

The second way to look at it is that upper management told them they had to get rid of at least one full-time employee from each group; the list of laid off employees certainly lends credence to this thought. If that was the case they could have chosen Pravin, but he has been doing a lot of the management of the off-shore resources and did a lot of the web development before they moved from classic ASP to .NET and most future development is being pointed to the web (whether it fits there or not). Obviously, they could not get rid of him. They could have canned Steve, but Steve is just about the best analyst I have ever seen. I couldn't do my work without Steve (man I hated when he would go on vacation) and neither could anyone else, so they couldn't get rid of him. That left me.

So I have two ways to look at it, two way in which I could hold it and what I realized today is that I really don't care which one is the real reason. That is because being laid off by Indymac is not a tale of woe, not by a long shot. As I was saying to my wife today, "I'm having some real problems dealing with my feeling regarding this lay off."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I should be feeling really bad, but the word that best describes my true feeling right now is 'ecstatic!' I can't keep this damn grin off my face." I had truly come to hate my job. Not the work itself; nothing charges me like the creative process of developing great software. It was the politics of the place. But I was willing to stay and see it through no matter how bad it got (and it had gotten pretty bad with no sign that it was going to get any better in the near future).

But now I don't have to put myself through that crap.

I'm free!

I escaped!

And they are paying me a pretty good severance to to do so! Who could ask for anything more?

Day one of no job? Giddy? Yup!