Last Easter I was made redundant. It was a bit shit.
I’d only been back in work 8 weeks after being made redundant at Christmas.
Welcome to my Easter Redundancy Diary – I’m Hopping Mad!
Echoing my Christmas Redundancy Diary, this was how I coped at the time. I used my personal Facebook page to vent my spleen and pour out my bitterness so that it didn’t corrode me from the inside out.

CHAPTER THREE
MOOD; KALEIDOSCOPIC

Well, the Guinness Book of Records are yet to get in touch to confirm whether 2 redundancies in the space of 14 weeks qualified as a record-breaker. Certainly felt worthy of some kind of medal or cup. Already starting to dread the next Christian holiday given my track record of losing jobs; firstly Christmas, now Easter.

This particular bombshell was dropped on my day off. The process was to be swift. So swift in fact that I’d unwittingly already worked my last day. My job being defunct before my next stint on the rota. No more purple pinny. No more homemade soup from the cafe across the street. No more vague responses to customers questioning one of the products that I couldn’t pronounce, let alone advise on. Lack of training forced me to adopt the tactic ‘if you can’t blind them with science, baffle them with bullshit’.

A strongly worded email had been sent to Head Office in a desperate request for some clarification on the situation, the timings and pay implications. Instead of sending my email via the internet, I sent Boudicca on a Chariot of Fire, complete with some hot pokers for prodding. I wanted to be sure my message and questions were heard. The higher echelons of our establishment possessed less leadership qualities than a confused lemming. They clearly needed something to focus their attention.

They sent Boudicca back with a reply. She winked and said she’d used the pokers. The response from the ‘powers that be’ was as cold and unhelpful as a frozen fish in a blackout. Thank ye not for my 8 weeks of employment; the boost of self-esteem and confidence now trampled back down to the size of the stamp on my redundancy letter. My formal dismissal fell on the 11th April. Just 4 days between learning of my fate and it becoming reality. The date was already highlighted on our calendar as it was the completion date for our house. The day we could pick up our keys. And indeed my redundancy letter was waiting for me on the doormat as we stepped over the threshold. Not the ‘Welcome To Your New Home’ greeting we would have wished for. There is no good time to lose a job, but it would have taken some devilish scheming to have selected worst.

We’d put every inch of ourselves into achieving a home of our own. What was supposed to be something secure, concrete and permanent to show for years and years of hard work was already feeling unsafe, fragile and transient.

On the plus side, being unemployed meant I had plenty of time on my hands to help get us moved. Because we weren’t selling, we were able to organise an overlap before handing over our rented home, which lightened the load physically and mentally. As we moved our cat and the last of our belongings into our new home, my partner turned to me and said ‘This is us now’. And then we cried. And cried and cried and cried. We thought we knew what ‘Us’ was going to look like at the start of our new chapter. But this was ‘Us’ facing a big unknown. The only certainty being it was ‘Us’.

The final chapter; Easter Redundancy #4

If you are employed or otherwise content and stable with your work/life/domestic situation, please pop over to Wanted. Not Wanted. where you can have a smug, self-righteous, cosy giggle at my crumbling self-esteem. You’ll find my self-initiated Job Club, my ridiculous misguided applications for ANY kind of work and my redundancy diary, a revealing look into the day to day life of the lowlife worthless pits of humanity the unemployed. If you are not content and stable with your work/life/domestic situation, then let’s hold hands and stick our tongues out at the rest of the world. But you still have to go read all the stuff.