Rick McGinnis returns to blogging . . . the hard way

Rick McGinnis explains (and I know exactly what he's just gone through . . . I went through something similar at the end of November):

laid off

(It's been a while since I've updated this site. It would have been fair to call it - like most of my website - a derelict, but I had an excuse: a job that kept me very, very busy. I don't have that excuse any longer. Let's call this a work-in-progress, and see what happens. First, though, let's talk about how I got here.)

I KNEW SOMETHING WAS WRONG when my boss led me past her office, past the lunchroom and the accounting department, to the publisher's office where I noticed the company HR person and the union shop steward already waiting.

It took me a moment to realize what was happening, but once it started, I couldn't wait for it to be over. What made it so awful was the tedious scripting of the whole thing, and the boilerplate language: "unfortunately we've had to eliminate some positions ... I'm sorry to have to tell you ... just tell Ruth what you'd like her to get from your desk..."

I guess that's what made my first reaction anger, and not much else. It wasn't that I was mad at losing the job - the commute to the office had been a miserable ritual for weeks, even months, by now - so much as I was offended at being stuck in such a trite, predictable little play, and I was looking for some way to ad lib and break up the mediocrity of it all.