a.k.a. V.J.

To paraphrase Rodney Dangerfield, I’m alright now but a few months ago, I was in rough shape…

It started back in January. That was when I found out that my employer of 11 years was shutting down operations and I, along with all of my coworkers, would be out of a job. The news didn’t really come as a total surprise. Things had been trending that way for a while. It was mostly the timing — I was mildly surprised that we didn’t make it a little deeper into 2026. But, as it happened, we didn’t even make it a month into the new year. After January 23, I was on the unemployment line.

I had been laid off once before, back in the late 1990s. I also spent a few months looking for full-time work about 12 years ago after leaving a job on my own accord. But this experience, as they say, hit different. There’s never a good time to be involuntarily booted out into the job market, but at age 57, it felt like an existential crisis. Was I too old to be a viable candidate for lucrative jobs? Was I going to spend the waning years of my career underemployed or stuck in some position that I hated? Was I damaged goods?

The age anxiety was compounded by the fact that I was thrust into a 2026 job market that might be described as a dystopian, AI-fueled hellscape…and that’s if one were being generous about it. Technology was supposed to make life easier, but applying for jobs in 2026 is much more of an ordeal than it was in 2014 or 1998. I could go on a prolonged rant about the seeming futility of online job platforms like LinkedIn or Indeed, about being ghosted and jerked around, about how all of the humanity has been drained out of the process, and so on, but I wouldn’t be adding anything new to the discourse. Suffice it to say that the current system doesn’t serve employers or applicants very well and everyone seems to agree that it’s an abomination, but it doesn’t appear likely to change anytime soon.

I also don’t want to turn this post into a rant because, ultimately, I had things a lot better than a lot of unemployed people. I can’t paint myself as a victim when I had advantages like good health benefits through my wife’s job, a remaining part-time income from teaching, a house that is paid for, and generally a stable and supportive environment overall. For me, being laid off was something more than an inconvenience but less than a crisis.

Honestly, the stress was less financial and more psychological. I felt cast aside. Used up. Obsolete. And also, bored. I spent a lot of time applying for jobs and networking and, as I mentioned, teaching one night a week. Even so, I was still left with a distressingly large amount of free time. And it wasn’t free time that I could enjoy. It was more just dead space that gave me time to brood and feel sorry for myself and feel guilty that I hadn’t done more to find a job, even if I had just spent hours doing everything I could. It was the kind of free time one experiences late on a Sunday afternoon when dreading the week ahead. On more than one occasion that bleak “Sunday” feeling made me think about the old Morrissey lyrics:

Everyday is like Sunday
Everyday is silent and grey

(Pro tip: If you find yourself relating to Morrissey lyrics, that’s a strong indicator you’re not in a good place.)

One day, when I was sitting around the house wallowing in self-pity, I snapped myself out of it by putting my situation in perspective. I said to myself, “Your father had to land on Omaha Beach. All you have to do is look for a job!” That curbed the excessiveness of my moping but didn’t put a complete stop to it.

Fortunately, my time languishing on the career scrap heap was brief. About a week into my unemployment, a former employer contacted me and asked if I might be interested in returning to that company. My answer in a nutshell: Yep. Initially, the idea was that I might do some consulting, but after ironing out some details, we arrived at me returning in a full-time capacity. I was back at work on February 23 — one month to the day of the previous job ending.

So, in the end, I was lucky. Very lucky. I spent a month of “Sundays” in low-level professional purgatory and then my former employer unexpectedly threw me a lifeline. (See kids — it really is all about networking!) I’m really enjoying the new/old gig and am ultimately none the worse for wear. Looking back on it, it feels a bit like I survived the career version of a near-death experience. I think about the scene from Pulp Fiction when Jules and Vincent are on the receiving end of a volley of gunfire and after the shooting stops are momentarily baffled to discover that they went completely unscathed.

Like Jules, I’ve spent some time in the aftermath of the ordeal thinking about what it all means. Am I simply lucky? Blessed? Is it the work of fate or of happenstance? All I know for sure is that I need to make the most of the opportunity. When a job you’ve had for over a decade suddenly goes away, it teaches you that you can take absolutely nothing for granted. And I won’t.