Fired for Now: Getting fired, laid off, and hired again

Yesterday, I met my first prospective tenant. I’m making a big change in living arrangements in order to avoid making other changes – like selling my house.

So I’m giving up my privacy. My sense of self-containment. My freedom to act, behave and express in any way I want at any time of day or night — well, within the limits my family will accept. It’s certainly not as big a change as others have had to make, and it’s probably radical in the view of some others.

What adjustment … Continue Reading

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you may know I’m Canadian. Don’t hold it against me. As it turns out, we may finally have something to be envied by others: our banks.

For as long as I can remember, Canadians have had a rep for being conservative and cautious, especially compared to our American neighbours. Sometimes it’s well deserved, sometimes not.

After all, could a country that’s given you a range of people like Mike Myers, Jim Carry, the creators of Cirque du Soleil, William Shatner, … Continue Reading

I’ve never taken a class in economics and my eyes glaze over at a page of tables and numbers, so anything that helps me make sense of the current economic mess is appreciated.

When it explains that mess so thoroughly, at a pace that makes the minutes disappear and entertains as well, it’s a not-to-be-missed documentary for our times. That’s the film I.O.U.S.A.

Some critics have said I.O.U.S.A. is to the U.S. economy what An Inconvenient Truth was to the environment. It’s taken the dry subject of economics and cogently explains how the … Continue Reading

One way to deal with the recession is to ignore it altogether. In one sense, that’s what Philly Markowitz and Myke Dyer are doing.

Philly and Myke are married to one another, have 2 kids aged 10 and 13, and when Philly lost her job two months ago, it was the catalyst to pursue a life-long fantasy: to spend months traveling and exploring, with no job to tie her down, and pay for it largely by volunteering her time in exchange for room and board.

The only difference is now she is a … Continue Reading

Yesterday I was contacted by a member of a San Francisco-based team of filmmakers producing a documentary film on the recession. They have one particular focus:  to document how the economic meltdown is bringing about social and personal transformation. And they’re looking for volunteers with a story to tell.

Definitely, transformation is happening all around us. Amid foreclosures and payment struggles, self-doubt and fear, not to mention more time to think,  people are re-evaluating their lives. Some are choosing radically different paths. Some are taking stock of what’s important in new … Continue Reading

There’s a lot of AIG outrage in the air right now. But while the pundits, politicians and legal scholars debate what kind of recourse there is to rescind the bonus payouts to those disgraced execs, there’s something I’m not seeing a lot of discussion about.

It’s that the overall compensation model for senior executives in America is too high. Period.  Bail-out or no bail-out. They’re just simply over-the-top whether any government hand-out is involved or not.

If you are a believer in an unregulated free market, you may want to stop reading right here.

But I believe there is worthy debate to be … Continue Reading

Stress and sleep don’t make good bedfellows. I ache for continuous restful, sound sleep. On those mornings I wake up and realize I’ve slept through the night, I feel relieved and grateful.

On those mornings, uh, nighttimes, where I wake after a few hours of sleep, and lie there, with the thoughts of the stressed beginning to circle, I feel like crap.

Like tonight for instance. I’m writing this after waking at 3:30 in the morning. Of course, I tried shifting my brain over and over away from the worries that … Continue Reading

Last night I did something I haven’t since losing my job last November. I saw a movie in a theatre. From all the second-guessing I did beforehand, you’d think I was about to head to a GM dealership and buy a car.

I cut out almost all indulgences when I was laid off last November. There was so much uncertainty about the future, everything was up for question. Movies were out. Along with any other entertainment, like concerts, clubs, etc. Meals out of the house too. Along with new clothes, bottled water … Continue Reading

I’m sure you’ve heard of the smart little Canadian company called Research In Motion.

No?

Okay, I know you’ve heard of the Blackberry. Yeah, that little smart phone President Obama won permission to keep in his pocket.

The Blackberry is made by the Canadian company RIM (pronounced rim, not R-I-M), right here in Ontario in the small city of Waterloo about an hour’s drive from Toronto.

And something else you may not know. RIM IS HIRING!

Yes, in the midst of monstrous layoffs globally, RIM is adding 3,000 to its workforce in 2009. At that rate, … Continue Reading

There’s a living document of the recession playing out in real time. It’s not the numbers plastered across all media outlets today showing a 25-year high in the unemployment rate and more than 650,000 jobs lost in the U.S. last month.

It’s Twitter. And if you want to get an alarming yet utterly mundane roll-call of those affected by the downturn, it’s right here.

Twitter offers a search function. Enter a keyword and Twitter will serve up every tweet containing that word that’s been entered into the Twitterverse.

If you’re still in the dark … Continue Reading