Lately I've been driving past gas stations more often. Without stopping. That fact struck me today as I engaged in a little habit of taking a slight detour on the way home from lunch to swing past a few gas stations and observe what their prices are ( Read more... )

Hawk (my spouse) is now officially unemployed. I could have posted this yesterday, as yesterday was her last day of work and her boss told her she could leave at lunchtime. She was home around 1:30pm.

No, this didn't happen suddenly. Hawk learned two months ago that her company was eliminating her position. They offered her a new, lower role. It ( Read more... )

Friday midday I walked out on a meeting with my boss and a colleague. The colleague was being disrespectful toward me, even after I told him I found his behavior disrespectful and asked him to stop. My boss had acknowledged the problem beforehand (it's part of a widening pattern) and offered to help address it. But in the meeting he did nothing as ( Read more... )

"Nobody wants to work anymore." That's become a common refrain in the US, especially from people on the political right. It's a catch-all complaint to denote any of an umbrella of socio-political grievances from one's dislike of minimum wage laws, to snide beliefs about public assistance benefits and who uses them, disregard for satisfactory ( Read more... )

There was a small round of layoffs at my company today. No, I was not impacted. But ironically I was thinking about the prospect of layoffs over the weekend. While many stories in the news the past several months have been about record employment and rare leverage in hiring favoring job seekers, articles in just that past few days have begun ( Read more... )

Is the US in a recession ( Read more... )

Last week Better.com CEO Vishal Garg fired 900 employees over Zoom. "If you're on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off," he said. "Your employment here is terminated effective immediately." Employees found their access to company software systems shut off shortly thereafter. Example news coverage: Better.com CEO fires ( Read more... )

Are we still in a recession? That question occurred to me recently. It's kind of surprising there hasn't been much about it either way in the news lately. On the one hand, parts of the economy have been doing quite well. Others... maybe not so much? It's unclear.

Clearly things were bad last year in the spring. The National Bureau of Economic ( Read more... )

Whew. This story about my first experience with a corporate layoff has grown to 6 entries. Well, that's really not surprising as it was an eventful and formative time for me. Really the biggest surprise is that I didn't set down in writing, except for a few emails to friends at the time, my thoughts about it until now, so many years later!

At the ( Read more... )

Last week we discussed if/when we'd start going back to a hair salon for haircuts again. Our stylist had texted us they were open. But when we follwed up with her to inquire about her hours, she responded this morning that she's being fired-not-fired ( Read more... )