Brian Fields

Two weeks ago half of our department got called aside and laid off.   This was following the news my boss gave saying that RPI had chosen to lay him off.  Despite the fact that I had been uncertain about my job since the fall it was really a bit of a surprise.  We hadn’t heard anything and considering the past two rounds of layoffs were well known before it happened I didn’t expect it to happen that day.  For the first time since August 2nd 1998 I’m unemployed.

All-in-all I’m doing my best to be positive about it all.  I hadn’t had a raise in about 22 months, I was making well below industry standard salary, and our department always seemed a bit neglected or under appreciated.  I’m not bitter about it all.  I don’t think I have the right to get angry… after all, that’s business.  There are really only two things that upset me about it.  The first is that I probably won’t see a lot of my friends as often… if at all.  The second is that I was pumping 15% of my earnings into my 401k and now I’m going to have to roll it over into an IRA or something while it’s down by about 50%… meaning I’m going to get shafted out of a thousand dollars or so.

Admittedly, I’m not looking for jobs constantly.  I have my ear to the ground so to speak, but I just keep thinking about how it took me a year to find that job, and now that the economy sucks the experience I’ve earned probably isn’t going to get me as far as it would have last time.  I spent my first jobless week getting a lot of things done but now I’m just going a bit stir crazy.  There’s only so much I can do to keep myself occupied while not being able to spend any money.   On the subject of money, I’m doing fairly well.  With just my monthly bills I can probably go a little over two months with no income at all (not even unemployment) and without touching my savings account.  I guess I’ve done a pretty good job preparing for this over the past year, even though it wasn’t something I was planning for.  I think my best bet right now is to get a low-level job that can support me until I can get going again.

So yeah.  Here I am.  Jobless, looking for something to occupy my time and looking for a sign, answer, or push in the right direction.