Since getting laid off, I’ve been getting a little less exercise. My bike commute to work, a 14-kilometre (8.7 mile) round trip, is gone. I also haven’t been going to the gym as often, even with the extra free time. I’ve lost five pounds since getting called into my layoff meeting two weeks and two days ago, in spite of the reduced exercise and some pretty big meals, including an anniversary dinner, Wendy’s birthday dinner and the farewell dinner b5 threw earlier this week. I needed to shed that weight anyway; I should make sure not to gain it back once I land a job.
Should you lose your job, your mileage may vary depending on how you respond to stress. I’ve been waking up about an hour earlier than normal to work on my career plans, research the companies who’ve shown an interest in me, and to do a little extra work on some blog entries. I also haven’t felt like eating as much, which comes from feeling twitchy about the situation. If your response to stress is to eat more or drink lots of beer (a.k.a. “liquid bread”), the change in your weight is likely to be the opposite of mine.
Because I was laid off and not fired from my former place of employment, they’re taking me out for a farewell dinner on Tuesday night. It’s a nice gesture on their part, and I appreciate it greatly.
I’m allowed to choose the restaurant, and I must let them know my choice by Monday, October 6th. The problem is that I’ve just got too much on the brain and need help picking a place. If you’ve got suggestions, I’d like to hear them!
Some parameters:
It should be within easy walking/transit travel of Queen and Spadina (that’s where the office is)
My guess is that there will be about 10 people total.
There will be drinking. A lot of it. At least 2 two rounds of “Irish Car Bombs”, too.
It can’t be terribly expensive (which means that Nota Bene is off the list).
The usual office after-work hangouts are Wayne Gretzky’s and Jack Astor’s. While perfectly serviceable, I’m looking for alternatives.
Provides a layperson-friendly, non-drowsy explanation of how the credit crisis came about
Suggests the single most important thing you can do to protect yourself and your interests during the credit crisis (and in fact, any crisis, including being laid off during a credit crisis)
Don’t let the article’s apparent length scare you off — read it! Yes, it’s ten screens, but it’s set in a narrow column. If you’re still skittish about reading that much, shame on you, and here’s the part on which I want to focus:
Whatever the case, the best thing you can do to protect yourself and your interests is to make friends. The more we are willing to do for each other on our own terms and for compensation that doesn’t necessarily involve the until-recently-almighty dollar, the less vulnerable we are to the movements of markets that, quite frankly, have nothing to do with us.
If you’re sourcing your garlic from your neighbor over the hill instead of the Big Ag conglomerate over the ocean, then shifts in the exchange rate won’t matter much. If you’re using a local currency to pay your mechanic to adjust your brakes, or your chiropractor to adjust your back, then a global liquidity crisis won’t affect your ability to pay for either. If you move to a place because you’re looking for smart people instead of a smart real estate investment, you’re less likely to be suckered by high costs of a “hot” city or neighborhood, and more likely to find the kinds of people willing to serve as a social network, if for no other reason than they’re less busy servicing their mortgages.
I think Rushkoff’s got the right idea, and I’d like to torque it a little further. Forget for a moment the more fanciful ideas of printing your own “Canadian Tire Money”; when he says “local currency”, I want you think of these things:
Reputation,
Goodwill,
and most importantly, Luck.
Among the many things that I’m churning in my brain right now — along with updating the resume, finding a place to put all the stuff that I used to keep at the office and getting that eye appointment with Dr. Heeney before my work-provided insurance coverage expires — is real-world testing an idea and writing about it here. That idea rests on two principles, namely:
Having friends and being friendly makes you lucky. I’ve always suspected it, and Marc Myers wrote a book on the topic.
I’d rather be lucky than smart. It’s the mantra of my all-time favourite financial planner, whom I shall refer to as “P. Kizzy”. If I get even a tenth of P. Kizzy’s business acumen, I will be a very happy man.
Watch this space, ’cause I’m going to expand on those ideas!
Yearly statistics for the Accordion Guy blog, courtesy of StatCounter.
StatCounter says that sometime within the half-hour before I wrote this, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century got its 2 millionth page view for 2008. My thanks to all of you for making this possible!
Hint, Hint…
Hey, web advertisers! I get 100K pageviews/month and in the Technorati 5K. I can get you clicks! Email me at joey@joeydevilla.com and let’s see what I can do for you!
Hey, tech companies! Looking for a Guy Kawasaki or Robert Scoble, but who can also code? Think of me as the budget version of those guys. Or better yet, think of Guy Kawasaki and Robert Scoble as overpriced Joey deVillas. Once again, email me at joey@joeydevilla.com and let’s see what I can do to put you on top!
When the news is filled with talk of credit crunches, bank bailouts and poorly-thought-out metaphors, you can be certain that every business is adjusting their plans to ensure that it doesn’t go under. Cutting spending is one of the most important of these adjustments, and since employee salaries are expenses, companies are laying off the employees they believe they can do without and slowing down (if not stopping) their hiring.
This is not a good time to look for a job nor lose one.
What to Do?
Losing your job is a shaming, stress-inducing, heart-rending, and even frightening experience at the best of times. Losing your job at the start of what some people in the media are calling the New Great Depression is far worse, even if you think they’re exaggerating for effect.
In the time since I posted the article in which I announced that I had been let go, I’ve received about a dozen emails from people who’ve said that they’re in the same situation. They have no idea what to do and asked me what I was doing and if I had any advice.
I have some observations and suggestions, some of it from my layoff experience back in 2002 and some of it from the past few days’ experiences, and I’ve written them below.
You Will Know When You’re Called in for “The Meeting”
I knew I was being brought in for the “your services are no longer required” meeting the moment I was invited to it.
Many people dismiss intuition, but in experience, I have found that a well-trained intuitive sense will often serve you well in those situations where the situation is murky or when rationality is following the wrong path. I susbscribe to the theory that intiuition is your brain doing some massively parallel processing, subconsciously “filling in the missing pieces” when you are presented with incomplete information. That’s why Poincare said “It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.”
It might have been something in the Director of Tech’s voice or his body language. Perhaps it was that there’d been little for me to do in the past little while because of the overlap between our jobs. Maybe the fact that the meeting had been called up out of the blue with no explanation as to what it was about was the tip-off. All these hints would be clear to a detached observer, but to someone right in the middle of the situation, they might not be so apparent. Thanks (or no thanks, perhaps?) to a flash of intuition, I had a pretty good idea of what I was in for.
A quick aside: I believe that intuition is not independent of learning and experience, but enhanced by it. When intuition “fills in the missing pieces”, it has to get those pieces from somewhere. Without learning, and even more importantly, the regular application of that learning, intuition is no better than flipping a coin.
You Have Moments to Get a Grip
Armed with that intuitive flash, I had the twenty or so seconds’ travel time between my desk and the meeting room to collect myself. At this point, I only had a vague sense that this was my termination meeting; intuition isn’t a straight-forward thing like a warning light on your car’s dashboard or a pop-up window on your computer:
Do whatever it takes to steel yourself for the bad news. Whether it’s deep breathing, couting to ten, reciting your own personal mantra or firing up your “poker face”, you want to get ready to conduct yourself at the meeting with as much grace, aplomb and professionalism as you can muster.
The Second Most Important Meeting You Might Ever Have with Your Employer
I’ll admit that my termination meeting wasn’t as uncomfortable as this one.
(In case you were wondering, the most important one is the job interview.)
I used to work as a DJ at a popular campus pub at Crazy Go Nuts University. Both the atmosphere and the vantage point offered by the DJ booth gave me the opportunities to witness many breakups from a detached third-party point of view, whether I want to see them or not. Even at their best, breakups are pretty rough; when they get ugly, you can’t help but feel shame for the couple.
No matter what you’re feeling at the meeting, you want your termination to be as good a breakup as possible. This means that you must handle the meeting professionally. The way you behave at this meeting will set the tone for your termination. If it is full of freak-outs and acrimony, they won’t be inclined to do you any favors. On the other hand, if you conduct yourself in a professional manner, you may gain some goodies such as extra negotiating leverage and a willingness on their part to do what they can for you.
If you can remember these questions through the stress of the meeting, you should ask questions like:
When is my last day?
What is my severance package?
How long will my company insurance coverage last?
When do I have to return the company laptop and Blackberry?
How long do I have to collect my stuff from the office?
What do you want me to do with my current projects and files?
Can I get a letter of recommendation and use you as a reference? (Naturally, if you’re being fired rather than laid off, don’t bother asking this question.)
Don’t worry about memorizing these questions — just remember that you should leave the meeting with a clear idea of what they expect from you and what you can expect from them.
If they’ve given you papers to sign, do not sign them yet. Ask for some time to “look them over”.
Take a Walk as Soon as Possible
This is going to sound terribly touchy-feely new-agey, but I’m going to say it because it’s an important step: at your first opportunity, take a break, get out of the office and go for a walk.
When this first opportunity comes depends on the sort of place where you were and the conditions under which you’re being let go. In some cases, you’ll be asked to pack your things and leave immediately, sometimes with a minder assigned to you so that you don’t go pilfering office supplies. In my case, I was asked to say on for a few days to be debriefed and help with the transfer of responsibilities.
Since I was at the office for a few more days and since it was the sort of place where they’re pretty cool about going out for a break, I went for that walk at the first opportunity. (Besides, what were they going to do, fire me?)
The walk is important because it gets you away from the office and to clear your head. Regular readers of this blog know that I’m usually an easy-going, “go with the flow” kind of guy who’s seen and done some pretty crazy things, and even I needed that walk. I felt twitchy and drained at the same time.
The walk gives you a chance to come down from one of the most stressful experiences you’ll ever face in your working life and come to terms with what’s happened. It is not the time for figuring out what your immediate next steps are; it is the time to collect yourself for figuring out what your next steps are.
Don’t do the walk in a fugue state. Take note of your surroundings. Chances are you’ll see things that you passed by every day but never noticed before. This is good, because it’s preparation for what you’re going to be doing for the next little while: seeing things differently.
Deal with the Shame
No matter how good a job your were doing or how well you served the company, being let go will make you feel like thie cat pictured below:
It will feel as if you had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. In fact, that’s what probably happened. Perhaps you weren’t found wanting as a person or an employee, but when the bean-counters did the books, either you went or the company did.
Thanks to evolution, being let go feels terrible. It feels like getting dumped, which feels terrible because it means that you are failing your biological imperative to keep the species going. Without this feeling, we don’t have the drive to reproduce and thrive, and it’s “goodbye species”.
You deal with the shame, using whatever constructive coping mechanisms work best for you. In my case, I hit the gym, did a little writing, played a little music on the ol’ squeezebox and got involved in some very severe rocket-launcher-assisted altercations in Grand Theft Auto IV.
If you must, have a drink or two but don’t go beyond that. You want to take the edge off, not go on a binge.
You Must Come to this Realization
Crank up your computer’s speakers and enjoy the video below. It’s the Soup Dragons’ 1990 cover of the Rolling Stones’ I’m Free. Don’t be afraid to shake your booty if you feel the urge:
If you need to, play the video a couple of times just to make sure the song’s point soaks in: you’re free.
Once the initial shock of losing your job has worn off, consider this: the future has suddenly become a blank slate. That may sound scary, but you should think of it as liberating.
Think about it. That end-of-the-week progress report that management expects? Not your problem anymore! Getting a response from that contractor for the 50-page spec for that increasingly complicated e-commerce website that you’re responsible for? Somebody else has to deal with it now! Hunting down the bug in the credit card payment gateway? Rubbing an irate client’s belly? Putting new covers on the TPS reports? You’re free of all those responsibilities.
All the day-to-day stuff that you’ve been doing at work has just vanished. This frees you to stop worrying about the doing things for the company and start doing things for you. Without those things taking up your time and thoughts, both your calendar and your mind are free to concentrate on “You, Incorporated”.
In the Next Installment
The next steps, including what you can do with all that spare time.
Brian Jepson forwarded me an email with the preface “Couldn’t let this sit in my inbox without sending it to Accordion Guy!” The email announced some bands coming to his home area (he’s deep in Family Guy country), including an intriguing one called Accordion Death Squad. How could I not like a band with a name like that and a description like this?
Accordian Death Squad come from Ratsylvania, where we would dance, play music, fight, strip off all our clothes, blacksmith, and generally carry on without work of a mundane sort. A few of us decided to venture away from our past haven and found ourselves traveling dusty freight cars through a strange God-soaked place called the U.$.A.. Our instruments: accordions, cello, fiddle, mandolin, toy piano, guitar, tenor banjo.
America’s Got Talent Doesn’t Like Accordions
Here’s a clip from America’s Got Talent in which an accordion-playing duo get rejected simply for their instrument of choice. It’s a pity, because their technique is excellent:
I try to avoid watching reality TV because it usually just makes me angry. For example, take this clip from the latest episode of America’s Got Talent in which Branson accordionists Dan and Kim Christian get the boot simply because they play the accordion.
[Club organizer Peter Lapira] said the goal is to get as many different groups together to see how many they can perfect including jazz, tango and rock ‘n’ roll accordion groups.
“For people who think the accordion is goofy, they are so wrong. It is a wonderful instrument,” he said. “You really become a one-man band. We are the only country that doesn’t have young people playing the accordion.”
Squeezin’ in Montana
The Five Valley Accordion Association has been carrying the accordion torch for 22 years in the area of Missoula, Montana, and their annual jam took place this weekend:
It was a freestyle jam on an old porch under a blue sky, with young and old squeezing out some classic tunes – age 17 to age Reineohl. The only thing missing was an old bloodhound cuddled up next to someone’s feet, but the chorus of stringed and aerophone instruments kept young and old dancing and clapping.
With more than 200 dues-paying members, the FVAA is filled with accordionists and accordion fans across western Montana. Most, said FVAA secretary Nancy Kopszywa, are folks who just love to show up and dance. In fact, there are only about 20 or so members of the FVAA who actually play the accordion, though all play an instrument of some sort.
Mike Jones, of Victor, serves as this year’s FVAA president. The group gets together a couple of times a month, but the annual picnic and weekend jam is the most important gathering of the year.
“We get together twice a month, but this is definitely the highlight,” he said.
Reineohl, who was born in 1914, picked up the accordion and the banjo at a young age.
Though the average age of those at Friday’s jam session was probably approaching 65, Reineohl said the accordion is definitely making a comeback.
“It’s coming back to life fast,” he said. “A lot of country western bands around are using them. They’re a good lead instrument.”
Notably absent at Friday’s performance was any hint of a polka. And that’s just fine with Reineohl.
“The main thing with the accordion is that you think polka,” he said. “But you can play anything on an accordion.”
BlackBerry + Accordion = Any Tune, Any Time, Anywhere
Dorian Logan assists me at a Kickass Karaoke back in 2003. I have no idea what’s up with my eyes — I’m either looking at the screen or in some kind of accordion trance.
Last night, I was at the 9th anniversary of Carson T. Foster’s karaoke night, Kickass Karaoke. Although I haven’t been making it to Kickass Karaoke as often as I used to, I still consider myself part of the Kickass Karaoke family of regulars who’ve been belting out the tunes with Carson. I’d like to thank Carson for the music and all his support, and especially for making my mother-in-law feel at home when she came to a karaoke night while I was out of town.
One of the tricky things about bringing an instrument to karaoke is that it adds another constraint to what you can play: not only do you need to be familiar with the song, you also have to know its chords. Sometimes you get a hint when the karaoke disc announces which key the song is in at the start, but most of the time, you’re on your own.
I used to prep for Kickass Karaoke by Googling for chord charts for songs I wanted to perform on my computer at home, but last night I realized that the BlackBerry provided to me by my work could perform the same function right there at the bar! (Yes, b5media allow some personal use as long as we’re not downloading giant files like movies on it, and I might be the person in the office who uses our phone data plan the least.) I wish I’d had something like this long ago.
When I finally get an iPhone — and that’ll happen when (or perhaps I should say “if”) the data plan pricing here in Canada becomes a little more reasonable — I’ll have to build some kind of rig that’ll let me attach it to the accordion so I can quickly look up chords and lyrics.
