In Which Lill Reaches An Unemployment Milestone

One year ago today, it was my last Friday at my job.

It was the day I would sign COBRA papers and accept the severance package I'd been offered two months before of one week of pay for every year of service. The same package had been offered to all the layoff victims. However, when I read through the release documents on January 30, 2009, the severance payment had been reduced by more than half.

As I was thinking this morning about the two men who had orchestrated this sleight of hand, I pulled a page from an old word-a-day calendar. The word for the day? Invultuation.

According to Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary, it means "attempting injury by sticking a doll with pins." How appropriate. And how enticing.

A year ago, when I first felt the sting of this betrayal, I asked a lawyer about it and he said the reduced severance was more than unethical—it was illegal. But it would cost me all of my severance money to sue and it could have dragged through the court system for years. Plus I worried about how a lawsuit would affect the remaining employees. Would there be more layoffs simply because I was trying to get what I'd been promised?

I decided to appeal to the conscience of these men. Tried to reason with them. But in the end, I did just what companies hope for in cases like this: I walked away without most of my severance, without any of the more than 80 days of time off I'd accrued, without hope of recovering any of this.

I've tried to let go of my anger toward these men. I try not to see them as cruel, irrational liars. The kindest perspective I can take is to regard them as desperate. They concocted a way to hang on to a little bit of the money the company was hemorrhaging and they used it. It was a small amount of cash for a company, but would have made a tremendous difference for me.

"The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history."

—Stephen Jay Gould

Whenever I check my bank balance—to make sure I can cover the next bill or buy a few groceries—January 30 stirs in my mind. I don't know if I'll ever forget it. I wonder if the two men will?


[The Voodoo Hoodoo Spellbook can be found at Planet Voodoo; the doll is from Voodoo Authentica.]