Last night I went to a meditation class. I've often thought it might help relieve stress and be relaxing. I've got a fair bit of time on my hands. I haven't told anyone about it except my girlfriend. My friends would think I'm nuts. Not because they don't like meditation necessarily but because they wouldn't recognize lack of relaxation as a problem I currently have. As I mentioned before, I've got a fair bit of time on my hands.
I got laid off last year on April 1st. I don't like to say it, "laid off," that is. Not because I'm ashamed of having lost my job but because I'm not sure if I was laid off or just fired. So every time I say I got "laid off" I get this twinge of guilt like maybe I'm lying. But my Dad didn't like to hear me keep saying I got fired. He said it made it sound like I embezzled or something. I didn't like seeing my dad distressed and "sacked" sounded too British, so I went with "laid off". Plus it sounds sort of industrial, which is cool.
Whatever it was, my boss came into my office and gave me a misty-eyed speech about how things weren't working out and that it wasn't all my fault and it wasn't all theirs … blah, blah, blah, and that he really wanted to work with me and find a place that would be good for me and where I would thrive etc.. He said that this wasn't the end of our relationship but the start of a new process … It was all very heartfelt and touching. That was the last time I ever spoke to him. Don't get me wrong, its not like I got up and walked out holding my head high and never looked back and that's why I never saw him again. I hung around for nearly a month wringing out every last miserable cent that I could from that firm. He just never came back to my side of the building. A colleague got the same speech about 25 minutes after I did. We went out and got bombed that night.
I didn't tell my girlfriend right away. First it was because I was bombed. Then she had to go to the emergency room because of a minor but painful kidney infection. I drove her there and sat beside her bed while they waited for tests to come back. We watched TV on the lousy hospital system and I played with medical gadgets in the room. Once we knew it wasn't really serious it was kind of fun. It felt dramatic somehow but not dangerous. We watched some funny shit that I don't remember on Conan O'Brien. She said she was sorry to keep me up so late and that she could take a cab home and that I should go home and get some sleep since I had to work in the morning. I told her not to worry about it, that I had worked plenty of days with much less sleep and that maybe I'd just go in late. I mean what were they going to do fire me? Yeah, she agreed, they wouldn't fire me for having to take her to the hospital in the middle of the night. They were assholes but they at least liked to put on a good show, and that would not be a good show. So, anyway, I didn't tell her that night. I mean Christ I couldn't tell her I lost my job when she was lying in the hospital could I?
The next morning I was going to seriously sleep in. What the hell were they going to do fire me again? The only problem was I remembered there was a meeting at 8:30. An email had gone around the previous afternoon and it said that it was mandatory that all associates attend. From the tone of the message it sounded like some heavy shit was about to go down. I read the message just after I got fired. It made me wonder if I was the heavy shit that was going down. Don't get me wrong I'd been late to many meetings and even missed a few, and I knew they couldn't fire me because they already had. But for some reason, since they had already fired me, it seemed doubly important that I show up and be on time. Maybe I just wanted to show them that I could be on time. Also, I was curious. I wanted to see if they were going to talk about me at the meeting. Not that they would if I was there, so the best that I could hope for if I showed up was that they wouldn't really have much to talk about at all.
I got a couple of hours of sleep and got up and drove into work. Driving in violated my first new rule — that of not driving in anymore but instead taking the bus, because it no longer mattered how late I was to work and I needed to save money. But, like I said above, I needed to be there on time. So Abibi the parking man got twelve last bucks out of me. That's OK though I liked that guy and when he let me get the "early bird special" even when I was late I hope he was pocketing the cash. The meeting ended up being a general ass chewing of the associates by the managing partner. Then he left and it was a general ass chewing of the junior associates by the senior ones.
After some complete bullshit about how some of us needed to show some dedication by canceling vacations and working for the team, one of the senior associates who seemed to be grooming himself for managing partner looked around the table and asked if anyone "wanted to call bullshit" on what he'd just said. I so wanted to call bullshit that I ached, but somehow I didn't feel like I really had the right since I'd been fired the day before. One of my friends raised his hand and said he would like to. I felt like kicking him under the table and telling him not to do it, knowing that the long knives were out, but it was too late. He called bullshit because the entire office was so slow for work and had been for the last year and a half that it was ridiculous that anyone should even think about canceling a vacation, because if anyone was out and work did actually come up there were at least six other people who could pick up the slack instead of surfing the Internet full time. He was right and after the meeting I gave him one of those fist high fives that the rappers give each other.
Once the bullshit meeting was over, the bullshit senior associate came into my office and said that I showed "a lot of class" by showing up at that meeting given what I'd been told the day before (apparently he knew I'd been sacked). He said it said a lot about my character and that I was going to be fine without this job. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I'd showed up pretty much out of curiosity, habit and not really knowing what else to do. He said that he wanted to sit down with me and have a good serious talk about my future and other things soon but that he was really busy that day. I said no worries, that I was sort of tired because I'd had a rough night. He gave me a knowing sort of look and said that he understood. I realized that he thought I'd had a rough night because I was broken up about losing my job. He didn't understand. I was just short of ecstatic about losing my job. No, I said, it wasn't that, it was that I'd had to get up and take my girlfriend to the hospital. He looked concerned. Was she OK, he asked? I really really wanted to tell him she was dying and had been for a while now. That would certainly make them feel like a bunch of assholes. I just couldn't do it. I told him instead, that yes she was fine that she just had a kidney infection. I went from unleashing an unstoppable tide of sympathy and guilt to him thinking I was just having a lot of sex. I guess either way I tricked him. He said we would talk soon, that he considered me part of his family and that he and the others in the office would not forget me. I never saw him again either.
After that I went down to the parking garage and took a nap in my car. I'm not sure how much class that showed. When I got back upstairs there were two voicemails and two emails from a particularly annoying associate. I had been working for her over the past month and a half on a big project that had once kept me awake and in the office for three straight days and nights. Everything she ever gave me was a nightmare and on a ridiculously tight timeline. Anyway, she wanted four different things done and they all had to be done before lunch or the sun would explode or some shit. Luckily she always ended her emails with some snide remark about how if I didn't think I could handle it to let her know right away and that she would find someone who could. Her voicemails sounded frantic but that was normal. I emailed her back saying that I really couldn't help her because I was swamped with some other really urgent stuff that had just come up and that she'd be better to find someone who could deliver what she needed when she needed it. I then headed down the street to a café in Pioneer Square and picked up a newspaper. It was a nice spring day and I sat outside among a bunch of other paper-reading, coffee-sipping, nothing to do at 10:30 in the morning types. The sun felt great and my life seemed full of possibility.
I didn't tell my girlfriend that night either. In fact I didn't tell anyone. I was just too tired to go over the whole thing. Plus, I knew that once I told people it would cease to be entirely my problem. Hell, my problem wasn't that bad at all. It was only April and I'd already made much more than I had ever made in a year at any previous job. I could just get up and leave like I was heading to work every day and go do anything I wanted. No one needed to know but me. It could work.
