Expendable

I’m not in a good place right now. Friday morning, I was let go from a job I had worked for 13.5 years. This was my second stint with the company. The first had lasted five years and ended on my own terms. It had been my first “real” job out of college. I entered fresh faced and extremely naive. After five years, I had left for what I thought was a better opportunity. Four years later, I discovered how disposable I was, when that employer let me go completely out of the blue.

After bouncing around for a couple years, freelancing and building technical skills through a couple of odd jobs, I found myself back with my first employer, this time in a completely different role — and a much better place — than the first go-round.

As the years passed, my responsibilities grew and my role evolved. I came on board in early 2006 as a customer support specialist. I handled phone calls and support requests from our website customers. As time went on, my role evolved to include custom programming. By 2010, I was a full-time developer. I thrived and grew in my coding knowledge and proficiency, and I am extremely proud of the work I did.

At the time of my departure, I was the longest tenured employee at the company. I was well-liked, highly respected, intensely respectful of everyone around me, and deeply caring of the people I had come to see as my second family.

My original boss sold the company to his long-time second in command at the end of 2012. A few years later, he passed away after an extended battle with cancer. We grieved his loss together as a team and individually as people who’d spent years working for and with him. My own relationship was complicated, but I grieved the passing as the loss of a mentor and friend.

So many people came and went over the course of my tenure at the company. I am humbled and honored to call many of them friends.

My older son was barely five years old when I came back in 2006. He started kindergarten that fall. This spring, he graduated from high school and is set to start college in the fall. My younger son was born during my tenure. The company even surprised my wife and I with a shower. He’s going into the fourth grade this year and will be 10 in October. He has literally grown up with my work family.

Over the years, I dedicated a great deal of myself to the company. Countless late nights, early mornings, weekends at the office — even a few all nighters to make sure promises were kept, deadlines were met, and support requests were handled promptly while the rest of the team was at a trade show half a continent away.

I'm very good at what I do and a very dedicated employee. I take ownership of my job and the welfare of the people I work with, both internally and the customers we serve. My direct contact with customers has diminished greatly over the years, but my commitment has never flagged.

My parents raised me well, and I like to make them proud. I considered my job a calling. I sweated the details and threw myself into my duties. Even when I wasn’t “at work,” I mulled over challenges, monitored emails, answered questions, and did what I could to make sure things were going right.

Sometimes that meant getting in the car at 10:00pm on a bitter winter night after getting my younger son to bed, driving the familiar eight-mile trek, spending three or four hours fixing code, driving home, and getting a few hours of sleep before doing it all over again. To me, that was just a natural part of the job, and I did it without hesitation. Even now, I worry about the coworkers left behind and the projects left undone. They’re all still family.

That’s what makes what happened yesterday especially hard. Yes, the stress of unemployment and the unknown (where I go from here) are certainly weighing heavily on my mind, but beyond that my heart is broken. In the end, I was expendable, just like I had been all those years ago at my second place of work. When the powers that be crunched the numbers, they decided I was a commodity they could do without. You can spin it any way you want, but that’s the bottom line. I thought more of my employer than they ultimately thought of me. I was a skillset. That stings.

That hurt isn’t going to get better anytime soon. I should have known better by now, but I don’t. And I never will. Throwing myself into my work is just as natural to me as breathing. It’s in my DNA. And so, I grieve and move on, fully prepared to do the same thing all over again the next time around.