Lessons learned from unemployment

Late one evening in June, after a huge workout, a large meal and one heck of an awesome day spent with my sister, I was packing up my stuff to head home to crash for the night.  Work had been insanely busy due to a project that involved some major tax changes and I needed a good night’s sleep to make sure I’d be in good shape to work on that in the morning.  And that’s when I checked my Blackberry and saw a message from the company CEO.  I’d just been laid off by email. I didn’t have a job to go to in the morning.

I’ve never been unemployed unless I chose to quit or change jobs.  This was a first.  And it had been done electronically.  It pissed me off initially.  It pissed me off because it was one of those things that you just don’t do.  My friends were shocked, not that I’d been let go – that’s just the nature of business sometimes.  But that I had been let go by email.  “Who do you work for again?  Oh right.  Them.”, “Oh geez, how low can they go?”, “Ok, that’s the most rude thing I’ve ever heard”.  Those weren’t my comments.  Those were comments from people I know.  That’s the kind of impression that a company leaves when they act that way.  Personally, I don’t care anymore.  When things like this happen, we’re to learn from them.  I don’t want to complain – I don’t care to complain.  But it certainly made me add one more thing to that master list that I keep of ‘things I will never do if I own a business later on’.

When you’re unemployed, it feels like you live outside of the rest of society.  You cease to be able to relate to pretty much everyone else.  You forget during a midnight phone conversation that the other person on the line has to wake up at 6am the next day and the next day after that.  You forget that people have schedules that aren’t theirs – they belong to someone else who made up the hours.  You don’t care to celebrate weekends because every day is a Saturday.

But all of this takes some skill.  Because initially, you panic.  The first thing you think about is money – no matter how much savings you have set aside.  When you’re used to a certain amount of regular income, any hiccup causes a bit of a panic.  And then you get started on resumes and cover letters and phone calls and in-person meetings and applications for security clearances and other paperwork while juggling that with things like medical appointments and testing and physiotherapy and other obligations.  But after a few weeks, I got annoyed.  I’d had enough.

Enough with placement agencies and their complete incompetence at selling you, or returning phone calls or emails.  Enough with companies that appear reputable.. until you get there and it’s just a room, three guys and an Ikea desk.  “I got my job because I know the CEO”, said one of the interviewers.  Enough with heavily structured work environments.  Enough with being asked to define terms that no longer exist in the work environment.  “Define this”.  “I don’t know what that is – do you use it in your environment?”.  “No, we don’t”.  Enough with companies that think that their pension is more attractive than the work environment.  If I have to work 60 hours a week chained to a small desk, I won’t be in very good shape to enjoy that pension.

You get tired of the lack of reason in the work world.  You get tired of being nice, just for the sake of filling some social need to not be a shit disturber.  Because, of course, the minute you make recommendations for improvement, you’re a shit disturber.  The minute you disturb the black and white with a dash of red, you’re a shit disturber.  Why?  Why are these structures all black and white in the first place?  At what point did you all start walking with your faces glued to your Blackberries instead of taking deep breaths and slowing your stroll?  At what point did you decide to just suck it up and live with it because well, that’s just life?  That’s not life.  That’s a heavily constructed way of living that, in the end, will leave you with sore backs and sad faces and a pain in your heart that will have you saying, “boy, I wish I hadn’t taken my work so seriously”.

I stood in line at Tim Hortons on a work day a couple of weeks ago and I heard two women dressed in their work uniforms (blouses and skirts and heels) complaining about their workplace and their colleagues.  And I thought ‘wow.  I don’t have to listen to this anymore.”  But isn’t it sad that this is what we talk about when we’re employed?  And when we’re unemployed, none of that matters anymore.  None of it.

Unemployment brings us closer to what it’s really like to be human.  It makes us realize what kind of work matters and what kind of work doesn’t.  It makes you realize what society looks like from the outside – and it’s only from the outside that you can really be in a position to learn.  It makes you realize how the vast majority of people are tired.  Everyone’s tired.

Unemployment makes you wonder why you even work at all.  “Why do you want to work for us other than the fact that you need a job?”.  “I don’t need a job.  I want to do this work.”  And that’s the truth, as much as I have enjoyed this experience of being unemployed, of not having a schedule, of taking the time to look at life from the outside, I miss doing what I did.  I enjoy finding flaws and shaping processes and applying creative solutions.  I enjoy learning.  Most of all, I want to do all of this in the right environment.  Cash isn’t king, baby.  The environment is.   It’s the environment that shapes a person’s quality of life.  The more you appreciate the quality of your life, the happier you’ll be.  The more you’ll be in a position to enjoy the fruits of your labour.  The more we say ‘no’ to awful environments, the more we help to define the evolution of the modern workplace.

“We’re hiring you not because you have the most knowledge or experience but because you seem like the type that won’t do things the way they’ve always been done -  you’ll do things the way they should be done”.

I have waited for a comment like that my entire life.  That kind of reason is simply a thing of beauty.

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