It was a pink slip.
Last week was what I like to call my first Fire-versary™ when myself, along with 499 other employees, got laid off from a leading cybersecurity company. See if you can guess which one from the picture.
After having their best year ever according to last year’s Wall Street report, they apparently decided the only thing better than record profits was fewer people to share them with.
It's the corporate version of Ozempic.
So how did I celebrate the special occasion? Well since I left, I haven’t thought about it that much. Of course, I miss almost all the people I worked with (you know who you are). And I definitely miss the stock options.
But, like they say at Boeing, when one door closes another one opens. I’ll be here all week.
I don’t know how my fellow ex-colleagues are celebrating theirs, but in the year that’s transpired, as I wrote about here, in addition to peddling my copywriting and creative directing skills, I’ve fallen into a second career as a book editor. In fact I’m working on editing my seventh book as we speak.
I’ve also been catching up with my life, having done and continue to do things around the house I had to put off when I was employed full-time. You probably know this, but I'm able to do all this because I'm so handy and mechanically inclined. Remind me again, which end of the hammer do I use?
Also, my binge-watching has become both more sophisticated and medically concerning. Between new seasons of Hacks, Your Friends & Neighbors, For All Mankind, Shrinking, Euphoria, Running Point and From, to new shows like Widow’s Bay, Rooster and American Classic, my eyes are in a perpetual state of bloodshot. The price I pay for being Hollywood conversant and a joy at dinner parties.
Honestly the year has flown by. Every once in a while, I still wake up with the instinctive urge to check Slack or log in before remembering nobody’s waiting for me to update a job ticket anymore. And that’s probably the strangest part.
For something that felt so seismic at the time, the world barely paused. The coffee still brewed. The dog still needed walking. TV kept auto-playing the next episode. Eventually the old job stops feeling like an identity and starts feeling like a season finale that might've gone on one episode too long.
Which is fitting.
Because the traditional first anniversary gift may be paper. But apparently the modern one is perspective. Folded neatly into an envelope I never asked for.
