December 16, 2001
  layoff

For the past two weeks, there have been security guards littering the @Home campus. Every time you turned around, there would be a four foot security guard hovering nearby, smiling hopefully on the chance that you had just been caught trying to rip off something expensive.

On Wednesday, they even installed motion detection cameras. "Closed circuit," trumpeted the email from Facilities. "In exit and entrance points throughout the campus."

As an upstanding member of society, the presence of all this security promptly generated in me an urgent, obsessive urge to steal something.

A whiteboard. Suddenly, I really, really needed a whiteboard.

"I'll buy one for you," the Manager said with exasperation, after listening to me plan the theft of a massive, wall-sized whiteboard for the fourth time.

"That's not the point," I had to explain. "It's the stealing part that I'm wanting to do."

"Then why don't you?" she wanted to know.

On Thursday, after the announcement of the closed-circuit security system, I planted my framed poster onto the eraser ledge of a smaller whiteboard and regarded it critically. "You almost wouldn't be able to tell that there's a whiteboard there," I remarked. The rest of my team eyed me owlishly.

I beamed happily.

I drove Indian Woman (the Second) to the train station after work; she carried the whiteboard, protecting me from possible prosecution in the event we got caught. "What'll they do," I scoffed. "Fire me? -- Here, you hold it." Indian Mom kept us company on the way down to the car, eyes bright.

We passed our group's network architect, who watched us carry away the whiteboard with a gratified, "So you're finally going to take it, huh?"

We passed three security guards on the way. One of them even held a door open for us.

The next day, on the way back from checking in my laptop with the Manager, I dove into a supply room and liberated a box of dry erase board pens and an eraser. We went on our way back to our desks; I began busily arranging them in my small purse so that no evidence would show. The Manager watched me with a grin.

"It's always interesting to see how different people will react to being laid off," she commented. "Now I know that Yuhri starts to steal things."

"I can't steal a whiteboard and then not have any pens and erasers for it," I pointed out, reasonably. "It's illogical. Besides. I'm not stealing them. I'm . . . liberating them."

They were my own, personal Afghanistan. Red-blooded American, that's me.

Friday was my last day as an employee of Excite@Home.

The Manager was informed about the layoffs on Wednesday, at her staff meeting. "You can't tell them until Friday," she was instructed. "Nobody is allowed to know until then."

"What, do they expect us to go online and ruin the network out of pure revenge?" we demanded when we cornered her, afterwards. "Don't be silly."

"There's nothing you could do to @Home to make it any worse than it already is," the Manager said, cynically. But she still refused to say. "I can't," she apologized to us all. "I'm not allowed to talk about it."

We dispersed to our cubicles to carry on with our intensive programs of goofing off. That evening, as I was leaving, the Manager stopped me. "I need to talk to you for a few seconds before you leave," she said, en route to a conference room with the Firecracker. "Could you wait for a few minutes?"

I curled up on my cubicle chair and spun slowly in circles, watching the carpet whiz by. Wheee! Indian Mom and College Boy were already gone. Indian Woman (the Second) came to hang on my cubicle wall and chat. After a few minutes, the Manager came back out with a bouncing Firecracker. I peeled myself off the chair.

"Thursday?" I asked, bluntly, "or Friday?"

She laughed and shrugged philosophically. "I might as well tell you," she said. "This is stupid. Don't tell anybody else; they don't know yet."

I have problems keeping secrets, but I kept that one, by gum. I closed my lips over it and squished down hard. The two who hadn't been told anything, Indian Mom and College Boy, were going to stay through to January; the Manager is supposed to stay until the final day. They weren't supposed to know until Friday. Heck, none of us were supposed to know until Friday. I laughed and chattered and did little dances and made people laugh and cleaned up my desk and I didn't tell. In the World o' Yuhri, this deserves a special award. Something in gold leaf, at the very least.

I wandered in to work late on Friday, wearing my blue flannel Tweety pajama tops and jeans. They were comfortable. I yawned hopelessly through the entire 'It was nice working with you, b'bye' speech we got from the Manager's Manager. As I wandered the halls, people would do double-takes to eye me askance. "Are you wearing pajamas?"

"I figured, what the hell," I'd answer. "I would have worn my pajama bottoms too, but they're too big, and they keep falling down around my knees. Not that I would have minded mooning the company, but I thought, hey, people are probably traumatized enough already---"

We went to check in our equipment and turn over our important badges and the like. I got my final paycheck, the cumulative vacation pay that I was owed. Remembering the lesson of the last group of layoff victims, I promptly deposited it in the bank: Just In Case. Wouldn't want there to be an accident if the company closed the bank account before I got a chance to validate that check, would we?

Everybody took us out to lunch. The Firecracker was already gone; she left on Thursday to head off to Hong Kong for the month. A group of us, coworkers from other teams and my own, trotted off to California Pizza Kitchen where we gnarfed down on vegetarian pies.

And then the day was done.

It was a tiring day; I laughed almost non-stop through the bulk of it, cracking jokes as I went. Every time I stopped, someone would place a concerned hand on my arm and ask, "Are you okay?" Plus, let's face it, I was having a certain amount of fun. I've never been laid off before; never been part of a company going bankrupt, either. It's one more experience to tally up on the life board.

I'm a little sad at leaving, sure. But that's outweighed by the fact that I got to sleep in until noon today. I'll miss the technology I was working with, and the fact I got to do it in a task chair that didn't spill me on the floor every time I leaned back. But most of all, I'll miss the people. Someday, I'll work with some of them again. They were the best. The absolute best. You don't get to work with people like that again in a hurry.

Not unless you're lucky.

Next chapter: Unemployment.