Unemployed? Nah not ME

"What are they going to do, fire me?" I had said this many times over the course of my five year tenure with the company. With over twenty-five years of customer service experience under my belt, a couple of different positions within this company, numerous examples of giving 110% for them, the CEO's repeated message that "We want you to think of us as your second family" and actually packing up my family and moving over 100 miles away from loved ones and friends at their request, I honestly thought that I would be the last person let go, no matter how bad the economy got. But on July 29th I was in for a rude awaking.

Some back story if you will:

I started at Corporation X (thus named because I don't relish the thought of being sued!) back in February of 2006 as just another korporate klone: a customer service rep. But management wasn't completely honest with me...no one mentioned that the company was for sale. So imagine the worry I carried when four months into working there I find out that we had been sold to Corporation T from downstate. This news came about 10 days after I had gotten married, and as a newlywed I was worried that I would be subject to the famous corporate practice of "last hired, first fired". With the stress of learning how to be married, having to hunt for another position was the last thing I wanted. Instead, the new management went through and fired almost all of the rest of the department! Both managers, and four other long time reps were given their walking papers within a short period of time, and I was last man standing (figuratively speaking). I thought that this meant that management was impressed with my abilities and professionalism, and vowed to work hard for them. And work hard I did. The other "last man standing" was allergic to work or something, because she spent most of her time on the phone with her husband or her mother, while I was cranking out the work: a constant barrage of phone calls and emails from customers while processing orders that used to be handled by six people. The hours got longer and longer, the help from the other rep got to be less and less, and I worked harder and harder just to keep my head above the tide of customer inquires.

I would get a couple of respites from the work load as new managers (I had eight managers in the five years I was with the company) and new team members came and went. After my first year with the company I received a promotion to a newly created position that was a step up the ladder as well. It involved more detailed, technical work. Stuff that I was learning on the fly, as I didn't have a degree in engineering, but really should have had one to perform the work. Needless to say there was a learning curve there, but I worked hard at asking as many of the right questions as I could, learning from my mistakes, and sometimes even flying by the seat of my pants.

Then, well then Company T decided that it would be "more cost effective" to close the plant where I worked, and combine my division with the division that they operated downstate. They would save so much money by building a new facility that could house both areas of production that they would be able to expand both divisions. How exciting! But not everyone would be offered a position at the new company, and some that were would be offered different positions, because they were taking the company in a whole new direction (again)!

Thus yours truly was offered a lateral move into another position, because well, her current manager felt that while she performed her current position at an acceptable level, it wasn't her true strength. She was "Michael Jordan playing baseball" in her current position. Learning, but not quickly enough. Besides, when they hire people for this position at the new location, those people will have engineering backgrounds to "properly service our customer base". So I talked it over with my husband and we agreed to take the trip downstate for a two and a half day week-end where the company would conduct tours of the area, wine and dine us, and even set up meetings with IDES and real estate professionals in the area. They wanted us to know as much as possible about our possible new home, and all the tools that they would make available for the chosen few that were thinking about relocating.

So my husband and I took the tour, got packets of information on the tools being set up, and did a boat load of independent research. During the wine and dine portion of the tour, the CEO and VP of my department extolled their admiration for my skills and stated over and over again how much they needed me, the only person from my department who had shown honest interest in the move, at the new facility to make a smooth transition. They won my husband over, and later in the hotel room he voiced the opinion that "since upper management thinks so highly of your skills, you really have a career with the company, not just a job. And that can't be taken lightly. We should move."

So move we did.