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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Merkuri" data-source="post: 4491873" data-attributes="member: 41321">I was laid off from the first job I had after college.  I worked for a government contractor, and was hired to be a software developer for the Comanche project.  This helicopter had been in development for something like twenty years.  The company was very vested in this project, and when I got there they had just built a whole new plant to start cranking out Comanches in large numbers.  About six months into my career I was at work when somebody pointed out to me a <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/02/23/helicopter.cancel/" target="_blank">news story on the front page of CNN.com</a> about how the Comanche contract had been canceled by the government.  After twenty years when we were nearly done they were scrapping the project, and nobody told us.  We were informed by the national news.  That was one of the longest drives home in my life.  I had been just about to rent my first apartment, and all of a sudden I felt really lucky that I was still living with my parents.They officially announced the contract cancellation to the company a day or two later and claimed that they were going to keep as many people as they could because they said the folks on the Comanche project were their best, but us in the software development department knew that the company had always outsourced its software development in the past.  We were the only software development project actually being developed in house, aside from some tiny projects that didn't need nearly as many people as had been working on Comanche.I miraculously survived the first round of layoffs when somebody who had been hired just a week before me was let go.  I have no idea why they kept me.  I literally had nothing to do for about four months.  The remaining developers were told to tie up all the loose ends of the project and wrap it up neatly so that it could possibly be re-used for other things, but I hadn't been there long enough to be useful in that context, and at that point teaching me about the project so that I could be useful was just not worth it.  At one point my boss had me clean up the desks of the people who had been laid off or moved to other projects.  THAT was depressing.  The rest of those months I spent playing solitaire or surfing the web.  At one point they moved us from our big spacious cube farm to a basement room with cement walls, no windows, and just several lines of desks (no cubes). They needed the space upstairs for another project and we had only been using a small fraction of it after the layoffs.  That was almost as depressing as cleaning up the empty cubes.  I felt like they were trying to hide us away.Finally, they found me a little project to work on.  I was helping to creating a database to catalog a lot of the pieces and parts needed for the helicopter.  And just when I was beginning to feel useful they had another round of layoffs and I was let go.  I knew it was coming when one of my coworkers who had been hired the same exact day as me came over to say goodbye.  We were so close in our abilities and experience that I knew there was no way they'd keep one but not both of us.  They did it on a Friday morning.  They took me upstairs to somebody's office and told me that I was being laid off, then they brought me to the room of a counselor who I think was supposed to make me feel better about being laid off, but it really didn't help.  Even though I had known it was coming for a while and I wasn't in any real financial danger (I had been saving almost all of my wages because I was still living with my parents and though they had charged me rent it was nothing compared to a real place) I still took it hard, and nothing the counselor said could stop me from crying.  Once I had composed myself a little they took me back down to my desk and watched me pack up my stuff and say goodbye.  Packing up was easy since nearly all of my possessions were already in a box from when we moved into the basement.  I wasn't allowed to touch my computer after the man had come to get me to tell me I was being let go.It turned out to be for the best because I ended up getting a better job at a company where I wasn't helping to create a weapon (honestly, that did bother me a little though I told people at the time that I didn't care).  I was only a mediocre employee at my first company, but a spectacular one at the second, if my reviews have anything to say about it.That was longer than I was planning, but that's my layoff story.  Thanks for reading. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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