Someone at work...

lost their job yesterday one of those things where they pack you out that day with your stuff in a box and no explanations left behind.

I knew who it was, a competent employee but an unhappy soul with personal skills like gravel in the gears. I know what its like, too, to have that conversation where a boss somewhere tells you that you don't fit into the plan, or the future, or whatever is next and today is the end. Whether you think it's coming or not there's still no good way to walk out of a building with your personal life in a cardboard box.

And in these times there may be no going back. It's not like the days when you could get dropped from one place and scooped up by another and sometimes even do better then before. Now you wait with a hundred others, people younger, people cheaper, people better prepared, and hope you can elbow someone out of the way and avoid getting the skinny envelope from HR.

Two things cross my mind at this moment. I feel sad for yesterday's unemployed. This morning when he wakes up and the day is just filled with hours he either starts to see the horizon or starts to see the living room walls. From what I know of him it may be the walls. Selfishly, of course, I think of myself, simultaneously glad that it wasn't me and dreading the day it could be. What would I do? Where would I go? How would I feel? Having made it through before could I do it again?

If not for faith, who knows?