Last year, things were looking scary for the Seaview family.
My primary employment was, and still is, a small business, providing variable income and no benefits. My wife had a "secure" job in an office five miles from out home, earning good money and great health benefits. We were in surprisingly decent shape for an American family in early 2010 -- above water (albeit barely) on our home, no car payments, little or no credit card debt -- but we had no cash reserves, and we easily spent our combined incomes as fast as they came in without extravagance or waste.
You can imagine the next paragraph.
Her part of the company was sold off, and was scheduled to close within about two months. She was about to become an out-of-work financial analyst in a state full of recently laid off bankers. I had been self-employed for six years, and the IT industry ain't looking for fifty-year-old geeks without college degrees or recent corporate experience. In short... it looked like we were well and truly fucked.
This is the story of our survival.
When my wife called me last spring with the news, I made one phone call, and sent one Email.
The call was to my old boss at the IT consulting firm I left in 2004. He was expecting my call: my wife's employer was his customer, I had been stationed there while I was with the firm, and he knew my wife was an employee of the axed division.
He had nothing for me, but he promised to "keep me in mind."
The Email was to a manager within what would remain of my wife's company, with whom I had worked closely for years. She wrote right back, saying she would do her best to find something for my wife, but she had no immediate prospects.
So, we braced to suffer a Catastrophic Loss of Income and Health Insurance. My wife could expect some severance pay, which would get us to about Christmas, but then our money -- and insurance -- would disappear rapidly. We discussed all the potential outcomes, all the way down to bankruptcy. Our prevailing emotion at this point was fear.
We cut all of our optional expenses to the bone. We shut off our Netflix account, canceled our nascent vacation plans, and discontinued all other optional entertainment. We were never much for eating or drinking out, but we completely gave that up. We both have carry permits & carry concealed firearms; we do like to shoot and we had just joined a pistol club. We dropped out of the club, used up our practice ammo, and gave up that expensive hobby for a while.
My wife plunged into a massive job search, both inside and outside her company. She did everything she could to secure a position with the new owners, but they already had plenty of financial people. She applied for jobs with her current employers, but there was a mad scramble going on for the few available positions. She also started looking for jobs everywhere else, just like everyone else who faces this kind of dilemna.
Meanwhile, I was looking around like crazy, but not finding anything. I'm basically a Windows repairman; I'm more experienced than most, but gray hair counts against guys like me. The jobs I could land would have paid less than $15 per hour, and most of them were through staffing firms without benefits or prospects. I feared ending up in a blue shirt at the Apple Store, or worse. I flogged my existing business as hard as I could, but only a massive investment in advertising would have offered any chance of doubling or tripling its income... and we lacked faith in that, considering the shrinking pool of employed customers in our area.
The first reprieve came because of my wife's secondary duties.
We knew right away that the new owners would not need her financial acumen. The day she called me with the bad news, however, I predicted that her role as the Keeper of the Technical Documents would prove necessary for the transition, at least in the short- to medium-term. She dismissed this idea.
Before the layoffs, the CEO of her dissolving business unit came to her directly, and asked her to stay on the payroll for at least a few months after the sale to help the new owners transfer and catalog all the documents. He offered to maintain her current salary & benefits, postponing and lengthening her severance, and to give her an additional $1000 bonus on the severance for every month she remained. How could she refuse? She didn't.
The few months stretched on into November, when her old branch of the company finally closed its doors (and its payroll) permanently. The next day, she continued at the same desk as a contractor for the new owners, paid through a staffing service... at $49 per hour, finishing up the now-massive Documentation Transfer Project.
The second reprieve came from my old boss.
While I was visiting my ailing father in Oklahoma, the call came: would I consider spending three weeks on a Help Desk?
"I'll do it," I replied, without even asking where it was or how much it paid. Not asking was a good decision, as it only paid $17 per hour...
That 3-week role turned into eight of the busiest weeks I ever spent. The client company was a rapidly-growing, profitable firm with way more than 20,000 computers in a few dozen states. Stuff broke all the time, the phones rang off the hook, and I was back in my element. My third day, one of the telecom techs caught a virus on his laptop. Desktop Services wanted to reimage it, which would have left him without most of his job-specific software for the weekend... and he was on call.
"Excuse me, but I specialize in malware removal. May I take a quick look?"
I killed it in ten minutes, which really got people talking. They kept talking when the numbers came in, and it turned out I was statistically the lead tech on the Help Desk. They talked even more when dozens of computers dropped off the network at a busy call center in Baltimore... and I spotted it on the first phone call that came in, alerted the head of the Network Group, and predicted that the tech he sent scrambling to the site would find that some idiots had plugged in a consumer-grade cable router. (They had).
While I was geeking like our lives depended on it, my wife was raking it in. She received her old salary as severance pay through this May, and she banked every dime of it... and set aside a big chunk of her other income as well. Neither of us were comfortable with the location of these jobs, as they were over the bridge in New Jersey where her Right to Keep and Bear Arms was null and void, but we had little choice. Meanwhile, my eight weeks at a "real" job didn't pay all that well, but all that money also got stashed away. When my temporary role ended right before Christmas, I left on great terms with a promise of more work in the near future.
It took them eight weeks; I was back Valentine's Day. Slightly more money, the same duties, and a promise of direct full-time employment "soon." (I'm still waiting, but now I'm paid directly through my business -- they're my best customer -- at a higher, quite satisfactory rate). My small business thrives on their money, and I handle my residential customers evenings & weekends. This often means that I leave before dawn, get home after dark, and work Saturday and Sunday too, but nobody can complain about that these days.
Speaking of evenings and weekends, my wife finally got the call last month: she was asked to work for her old company as a temp... by the woman I had Emailed a year before when we first heard about the layoffs. She continues to work for the other company, finishing up the documentation project evenings & weekends, putting in 70- and 80-hour weeks, and banking the money. Meanwhile, back inside the company where she had worked for nine years, she was getting called for interviews for internal job postings: this manager has quite a bit of influence, and other managers take notice when she brings someone to their attention.
And she just accepted a job in that company, as a full employee with full benefits, with a higher rank and much higher pay than her old job. Best of all, it's here in scenic Delaware, where her RKBA is legally enshrined (by extensive training & background checks).
The result: losing that job was the best thing that happened to us financially. When she called me that day, we had no money in the bank; as of last weekend, we have almost $50K set aside for a rainy day... and the sun is shining. I'm suddenly in a position to decline an offer of full-time employment for my best customers: taking their full-time job with benefits would actually cost us money, as we would have to pay a lot for the benefits and make their much weaker policy my primary insurer. I am reasonably confident that they will keep paying my hourly rate under the current arrangements for as long as I'm willing to put on the headset and take the punishment. If I'm wrong, and I am cast adrift, I'm in a much better position to launch a new advertising campaign for my company... or to plunge back into the job search with fresh experience and recent, friendly references.
For me, as a Liberal, the morals of this story are:
--It's not what you know, it's who you know. Both of our jobs came through my direct contacts with two people in one morning. The hundreds of résumés my wife mailed out, and the few dozen interviews she attended, got her nothing but a closet full of "interview clothing" and a grand tour of the greater Philadelphia area.
--The race occasionally goes to the hardest workers. I'm still on the job today because I work like a frightened rabbit. I answer the phones politely, handle the calls efficiently, solve problems that other techs would fail to fix, and grab the next call so quickly that my head swims; by 10AM, I can't tell you what I had for breakfast. My wife works harder and more determinedly than I do, both at home and at work; she got back into her old company not because I knew someone, but because that person knew her previous managers, and had long coveted her skills & dedication.
--What's happening in our economy is a crime, a tragedy, and a cruel joke. For every rare survival story like ours, there are ten thousand families losing everything they have... even though they are just as hard-working and worthy as we are. Many unemployed workers my age, in particular, have been reduced to cruel and unexpected poverty, their retirement dreams permanently shattered and their experience & education ignored or discounted by their former corporate masters.
--America is getting fucked sixteen ways to Sunday. Our middle class has been sold a bill of goods that has destroyed our purchasing power, pulled vast riches out of our collective pockets and showered it upon millionaires, and persuaded many of us to blame the poor. Even the Democrats have fallen for the prevailing narratives, despite their obvious basis on lies from the far right.
--We need to be helping each other, and fighting the power. We are forced by social and political conditions to stand together, rise up, and defeat the cabal of douche bags who run this country. They are counting on us to focus on our internal disagreements, to criticise Anthony's Weiner instead of John's Boehner. They want you to call me and my wife gun nuts, instead of calling Roger Ailes a fucking fascist. We are doing exactly what they want us to do, and that will be the death of America.