I’m the happiest redundant/laid-off-person anyone has ever seen.
It all starts inauspiciously.
I’m late to work, again.
Shoving my bike into an empty stall, I felt a buzz in my back pocket.
Text message.
My boss’s boss.
Am I coming to the meeting?
What meeting?
Where’s the meeting? I text back.
He describes the room. I recognize it. No windows. Three chairs. Enough for him, the Human
Resources lady and me.
He comes out to meet me and I have the biggest smile on my face.
“Please tell me I’m getting laid off today!”
Caught him off guard.
I’m grinning like a fool.
Don’t get me wrong. I loved my job, my colleagues, my office.
Could not ask for better, anywhere in the whole world.
It’s just after being cooped up in an office for decades, I want to be free.
They have the severance agreement.
I ask for a pen.
Slow down, the HR lady says, go home, read it over.
But I’m ready to sign the severance agreement, pronto.
Severance from this life, on to the next, is all I can think about.
After we meet, I hop back onto my bike and cycle to my best friend’s house. And then I cycle
on, the long way home, trying a new route, on a new bridge up and over an interstate, down to
the San Francisco Bay Trail, past egrets and herons, past glassy inlets and ponds mirroring
mountains in the distance, past sailboats and golfers, past a reconstituted mastodon skeleton
found in a nearby river bank, back home.
No. Not back.
Forward! Forward to whatever my new life might bring.
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