The Zen of getting canned

It happened just over six years ago, when the new boss called me into his office. The magazine was moving in a different direction, he explained. They no longer had a position for me. I was good but they needed a different skill set, etcetera"“ a stunningly brief, bizarre and fatuous end to nearly two decades of employment.

That was surreal enough. But even as his carefully scripted words exploded over me, a small disembodied voice spoke in my head, like the unseen producer talking in the anchorman's earpiece. "It's not cancer," the voice said.

As defense mechanisms go, this seemed like a winner. "Nothing you can say to me," the voice went on later, as if continuing the conversation long after the rest of me was watching replays, "can be as god-awful as what I've already heard. You don't possess that power."

That sharp, insistent voice cut through my jumble of post-firing imperatives: the calm, reassuring way I'd tell my family, the large objects I needed to smash.

Three rounds of treatment

Yes, job loss can be devastating, or so I'd read. This was my first firing (unless you count an obscure episode of yore: I was an admittedly lousy busboy). Security, income, the comfort of one's daily routine"“ out they go. Stress-wise, we're told, losing work ranks right up there with divorce, death in the family and serious illness.

Except I'd already had the serious illness, with fresh scars to prove it: I'd recovered from a third round of cancer treatment just a year and a half earlier. What was a little employment problem after that? How could this puny dismissal, this cliché of the corporate universe (new management, my high salary) hope to compete with cancer?

Surely it couldn't, not for the Zen ex-employee. I didn't have to descend into Kubler-Ross territory: denying, raging, getting depressed, bargaining.

"'Transition counseling'

I could, for instance, bury myself in practical matters, negotiating my severance package, dickering with a corporate VP in what, I must admit, turned out to be scarcely concealed fury. I read up about life insurance and pensions, digging out papers buried deep in my desk. I slammed the drawers shut. So much for Zen.

The company offered me transition counseling. The woman sounded cheerful and efficient on the phone. She talked about "psychometric tools," about "looking holistically at the individual." Apparently this can take months.

I said thanks very much, I think I'll look for work on my own. Guess I'm not the holistic type.

Trying to relax

And so I found myself at home, healthy but restless, unresponsive to friends' well-meant advice to relax and take my time. Being home, unfortunately, had become synonymous in my mind with being sick.

Besides, I'm not the relaxing type. An old friend in Atlanta had been laid off repeatedly as companies came and went; he calls himself "the plankton of Corporate America." But he savored the time between jobs"“ played golf, threw pots, traveled. I envied his light-hearted attitude. But lacking that, I wanted to put on adult clothes and go to work.

Pay cut, but….

And so I did, some five months after the sacking. All in all, it's been a pretty soft landing— a pay cut, yes, but still a good job at a good newspaper, which, for a guy in his late 50s, isn't bad.

I miss my old magazine colleagues, many of whom were laid off too. But I keep in touch with some. And now I have new colleagues, new friends, and a welcome fresh start.

Perspective"“ that's the word, the elusive attribute I sought. Stuff happens, life goes on.

No, getting canned wasn't cancer"“ not even close. But it does leave scars.♦


To read Robert Levin's account of his cancer treatment, click here.