It is official – I’m retired. I didn’t plan on retiring, my 401k had recently taken a hit for a family issue and I was working on rebuilding that, and come October I had some stock option that would mature to the tune of $40k. All I needed was 6 more years, I’d be 67 and ready to hang it up.
May Day 2019.
It was a Wednesday, me an’ Jon were doing the VM watch out of Centennial. It was 8:00 AM and I was on the horn with my boss Frank going over the list of work that had to be done by end of Q3. Suddenly Frank was pulled away for a priority call with his boss Ed. He said he’d call me right back.
I waited.
Suddenly there was a knock at my office door, it was Ken, Ed’s boss. In other words Ken was my bosses bosses boss. He requested my presence in the Redrocks Conference room. As I followed him we passed Mike’s office. Mike was recently congratulated for 30 years with Comcast. Mike was putting his personal things in a cardboard box. I felt a rock appear in the pit of my stomach.
The Redrocks Conference Room was filled with AVS folks, the team I helped build 10 1/2 years ago. I was hoping to enlist them in a huge security update for 300 servers in the field. Maybe this was the kick off to that plan? Ken asked them to leave the room and my hopes that this was a kick off were kicked to the curb.
I stood before Ken like I stood before my squadron commanders in the past, waiting for the hammer to drop. In the Air Force I learned to scan the paperwork on the desk and read upside down what the papers lined up for the commander’s attention said, thereby learning what commander was working on. Ethical? No. Sneaky? Yes, but it was a way to pass the time while the commander made me wait and sweat.
This was a skill that I wished I never obtained. As I scanned the paperwork in front of Ken I saw in big Xfinity letters: “Severance Package for” followed by my name. I sagged into a chair and repeated the words a past girlfriend once said: “Let’s just do this and hope no one gets sick”. Ken got HR on the speaker phone and we went over the articles of my execution severance package. I didn’t understand a single word that HR said, she spoke softly in a very echo-y room and when we asked her to speak up I swear she moved further away from the phone and deeper into her echo chamber. I wanted to ask her how it felt to lay off a disabled veteran, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to hear the answer.
One instruction I heard was that my layoff would start in 17 days and between now and then they didn’t expect any productive work out of me. I made a very concerted effort to live up to those expectations.
The End Of An Era
Slaughter doesn’t quite describe what happened. Besides myself the layoff included some very close friends and teammates: Tim, Arturo, Jason, Harris, Mike, Lew, Jerry, Rob, Dan, and many more. They even laid off our boss Frank which is why I never heard back from him. Our team that started with two dozen people was left with three people.
The hardest thing I ever did in Comcast was empty out my office. Not because of the memories of the friends, the hours spent serving our customers, the challenges and the victories and the fact that I actually loved working for Comcast. It was because I’m fracking disabled. Seriously – what do you do when you see someone on oxygen carrying a heavy box down a long desolate hallway; do you give him a hand? or do you disappear? If you work for the transmission department of NBC/Universal you take option #2 so fast you leave a vapor trail in your wake. I was wearing airpods listening to a pod cast but I couldn’t hear it over the sounds of wind whistling, papers rustling, and doors slamming as the hallways cleared of people in a high speed ballet of “If I don’t look at him, he can’t see me”
I figured that with my background and resume it won’t be long before I’m working again. In my 60 years of existance I’ve never really been unemployed. I started in 1969 with a paper route when I was 12 years old and it was nonstop from there until May Day 2019. Half of a century working. Imagine standing in front of a B-52 at 3:00 AM in -20 degree temperature shivering so bad your body ached from the tremors and you were waiting to start work. Now imagine looking back on that wishing you could do it again. That’s how crazed your mind gets when your application for a job gets ignored and/or rejected 50 times in a row.
One of my applications actually went to a law firm, Myler Disability. I figured with my Pulmonary Hypertension and my screwed up spine maybe they can get me disability. I’ve heard horror stories of people with stage 4 cancer and ALS being turned down, people’s applications taking years to become approved after long court delays. So I applied with Myler, filled out some forms that told them where I got treatment for my various ailments. They promised me that this was going to be a long hard fight and sent me some forms for my doctors to fill out to help them with the court should it come to that.
Before I could get those forms to my doctors I got a letter from the Social Security Administration this morning. I win. My application for disability was approved, I guess I really am screwed up. And yay! I am now a ward of the government.
The first thing I did was thank God, the next was to email Zip Recruiter, Monster, and Linked In – I’m done, stop sending me job notifications. I am now retired.
I like the sound of that: retired. I’m a bit younger than I intended to be at retirement, I’m also a bit poorer. That layoff screwed me out of $40k of stocks and the ability to fatten up my 401k but on the plus side we got most of our debts paid off before this happened.
So Where To Next?
Currently we’re looking east of the Mississippi, I would like a state with no income tax and warm winters. My wife wants grandkids and Wegmans. Either way, we’ have to get out of here. We live in the town of Brighton CO where the mayor just informed us that in June he was notified that the water of Brighton may not be safe for consumption, but due to clerical error he didn’t bother to tell anyone for three months.
This is the same mayor who is facing a recall election for over taxing Brighton residents for water to the tune of $70 million and for firing the city manager when the city manager told the residents of the city about the mayor’s $70 million scam. Then there’s our beloved governor who overrode a referendum which increased gas and oil leases for exploration by cutting back the gas and oil leases that the voters had approved. This is the same governor who tried to over rule the Constitution of the United States by approving a bill that forced the electors of Colorado vote for the candidate that gets the most popular votes.
They both need to be dipped in honey and tied across an anthill.
The symbol of the Democrat party is not a donkey, it’s a swarm of locusts.
Wide Awake Christian 