Little Victories by Jason Gay

Author:Jason Gay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

This is what it’s like to lose your job.

Somebody comes to see you. It’s early. This is by design. They want to get it over with, before the day gets started, before you can settle in. They have a Plan. You don’t know about the Plan, but they have known about the Plan for a while. They want to get the Plan over with, so they can move on and settle in with their day, return texts, go out for a mango smoothie at 10:35, and return to their computer and read that story about Ryan Gosling rescuing a beagle.

They find a quiet place and they tell you right away. There is no small talk. No weather, no American League standings, no Good God, did you see Game of Thrones last night?

This is what they say: We’re going to have to let you go.

This is a polite way of putting it, but it’s also accurate, because it feels less like a door being slammed and more like somebody releasing a grip as you’re dangling off a bridge. A minute ago you were sitting in a chair eating a cinnamon raisin bagel, starting to dig into your day, and now you are in free fall, a blur of panic rushing at you—what does this mean, how did this happen, how am I going to pay the bills, what am I going to do next?

Meanwhile the person who just vaporized your job is babbling about details of the split—severance, vacation, COBRA—and you are hearing none of it. It’s just noise.

You want to lie down. When people lose their jobs in movies, they’re always tipping over tables and throwing phones through windows and giving the entire room a brilliant, Oscar-winning F-you speech, in which they triumphantly promise to create a new company that will put this ungrateful dump out of business. In real life, you sit there frozen, incapable of summoning anger, much less an Aaron Sorkinesque soliloquy.

You’re told it has nothing to do with your performance. But you don’t really know, do you? This morning you came in to your job, and you thought you had a job.

This happened to me in 2008. I’d been working at Rolling Stone magazine for about eight months as the financial crisis unraveled and the economy cratered and advertising went poof. For weeks, very talented and hardworking people started getting canned all around me. Cardboard boxes were brought to desks; there were hugs and farewell e-mails and short, teary walks to the elevator. I kept my head down, but I felt secure. I thought it wasn’t going to happen to me. I was new, but I had a pretty senior-level job, and people with jobs more senior than mine told me many times to relax, that there was nothing to fear, the worst of it was over and everything would soon be fine.

Then, just a week before Christmas, someone came to visit me first thing in the morning. We’re going to have to let you go. I remember thinking it was a prank.

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