Losing a job - the realities.

Have you ever lost a job and wondered what became of those around you? Read about my experience and that of a couple other previously highly placed individuals.

I have separately read two articles on being jobless and how it impacts on one´s outlook of life thereafter. I feel inclined to write a little about my own experience as well specifically so because I am a HR Professional of over 10 years of practice. This means I have made hundreds employed by hiring them and a fraction unemployed by termination for one reason or another. I have also been jobless in the course of my life.

The two articles are by Dr. Bitange Ndemo who was once a Permanent Secretary in the Kenyan Government and the other by Dr. Nirmalya Kumar formerly of Tata and Sons in India. To set us off,  I share below extracts from their writings.

Dr. Ndemo writes in his article ´The day I left office, my phone literally ceased to ring´

´..The Kenyan culture is such that people attach value to friendship, but their friends value them for their money or influence.The day I left office, my phone literally ceased to ring. My “friends” had moved on. I found myself checking my phone to establish if I had inadvertently put it off. The phone was fine.

Prior to my departure from office, receiving 30 calls an hour was not unusual.  Although most calls were work-related, there were many social calls from many old and new friends, people you would expect to keep in touch with even when you left high office.  Strangely, such calls cease until you establish a new kind of relevance…´

Dr Kumar writes the following in his article ´ I Just Got Fired!´

´.. Once fired, you discover your friends and the integral qualities of those who worked with you. The interesting insight for me was that the higher in the organization you go, this “human” aspect declines. The people at the “bottom” of the pyramid treated me with the same respect and affection as always. Their smiles were genuine and open. Those in the middle, like my team were sincerely sad to see me go.  They repeatedly mentioned what fun it was to have worked with me…

… The reaction at the top of the pyramid was interesting. With three exceptions, the many CEOs and top executives I worked with closely for three years went silent….´

These two writers present the reality of being jobless and how it impacts on someone, how it brings one to query the type of friends they thought they had and where they could have gone wrong as individuals. 

As I indicated in the beginning of my writing, I have personally separated people from employment for one reason or another which always boils down to breach of employment regulations or the law of the land. On a few occasions, I have told departing employees that in reality, none of the people they are separating from will call or pick their calls one week from the day they leave employment.  How do I know that? Because I have been out of employment myself a couple of times due to resignations.

As one can notice from the Dr. Bitange and Dr. Kumar, it is not uncommon for friends to cut links with those we worked with when they become jobless.  Whether it is a bad habit or human nature is a question one answers privately but the lessons learnt remain the same regardless of the country one falls jobless.

I have been jobless for two cycles totaling more than 18 months in the past many years, a fact that is not known to many people. This is because when I fall between the cracks of employment, I try to be quiet about it because of the lessons I have learnt just like the two writers before me.

My first cycle of unemployment led me to reassess the role some people played in my life or rather the relationships we thought we had. You see, as a HR Professional; you introduce yourself as a HR and everyone asks for your number specifically to ´get them jobs´ if not their relatives and other friends. You mention that you are not employed or that you are no longer an in house HR and people stop asking you for your phone number. Your value is truly based on your relevance to the needs of those you think are your friends. 

There is a reason the people you work with are called colleagues and not friends by the way. This you will learn when they stop taking your calls two weeks into your unemployment. Calls from you are assumed to be calls to seek financial favours for it is assumed that everyone who is separated from employment runs broke and becomes a nuisance immediately. More often, one gets into a few financial challenges but as to whether they become a nuisance; I am not very sure.

For many years, I kept two mobile phones which could ring one after the other to a point that I hated phones. To a large extent, the number of calls I would receive in my working days made me be a terrible phone communicator to this day. I barely initiate phone calls because I got tired of the many calls I did receive from both outside and within the organization. 

Those who know me will admit that I barely call them and it is not because they may be jobless though. Making a phone call is not one of my strengths I must admit. Maybe some of the friends we have and assumed that are staying away from us are also not good at making calls. Maybe, just maybe but not so if they used to call regularly when you were in a job with them.

During that first round of unemployment, I discovered that my phones had a battery life that was way beyond the usual 8 hours within which they had been draining themselves. They could last for as long as 10 days without any major calls and many times. I must admit that I did check if my phone was working and I cannot remember how many times I misplaced it and could not find it for several days since it I could not use an incoming call to determine its location.

What I recall is that I remained with a very small number of callers who were always checking on me. Interestingly, they included my own father and mother, a couple of my brothers, my girlfriend now turned wife, a couple of friends who were as jobless as I was and a few other great guys I had made friends with outside of employment. No one called me from my former colleagues’ circles. They had moved on and if they did call, it was to find out if I had got another job to evaluate my relevance. I f I said no, they would barely reach out again. So was life. 

One day my dad asked me if I had noticed that I was no longer having people check on me. I confirmed to which he informed me that it was all part of life´s lessons. He advised that I use such experiences to draw lessons on the kind of people I related with as friends with a view to reclassifying them in a new circle. He urged that I should never revenge when I got back to my feet by way of getting employment. Indeed this provided me with an opportunity to redefine the way I related to many people to this day. 

You know, the bright side of being unemployed or rather being in a state where people around you believe you are of no relevance in their lives is that they weed themselves out on their own. Slowly by slowly, your circle becomes smaller, relevant and a tight knit symbiotic one. This way, you draw inspiration, experience and support from one another in a way that has never been as useful. It is not such a bad thing to be pushed to the periphery after all in retrospect.

The person who got me out of unemployment cycle one was not someone I had worked with before but a lady I had met in one of the many workshops I had attended. She was on my neck and was always asking me to apply for jobs she saw that were suitable for me. 

I was in another cycle of unemployment for another year later which I used to make personal evaluations regarding fulltime employment. I set to ensure my small business provided for my upkeep. It did as I was able to have a website developed, reached out to people who needed the services I provided and was able to make businesses that kept me afloat for one more than a year. During this cycle, I never told people that I was unemployed unless they asked. 

One day I recall some old colleague calling to ask me where I worked because he saw me in a sharp suit. He informed me that he really wanted to see me later to which I had no problem with. When he asked where I worked and I told him that I was self-employed; he hang up the phone and has never called me to this day.  This was not a shock to me as I noted such human behaviour in my first cycle of unemployment. 

Interestingly, all the people who gave me business opportunities were persons I met in high school –St. Mary´s School, Yala. It gave credence to my thought that the best and lasting relationships are not necessarily between the people you work with. They are more with the people you trekked with, starved with and shared a blanket with as you hustled. Very rarely does it come out of persons you meet at the work place, at best your colleagues turn to acquaintances once you leave their organizations in most cases. Even the person you had lunch with at the office on a daily basis or the one you sat next to for four years will most likely stop picking your calls when you are jobless.

For those yet to experience such life lessons; do not be shocked when they happen but share the story someday. You can however create super and lasting friendships or even marriage with someone you work with. There are numerous examples of successful friendships made out of a work place as much as there are the shocks that came out of those who were deserted by their own colleagues they thought were friends.

And so is life. 

Do you place a value on your friendship in a way that it only lasts as long as you get something from the other party or for as long as they are relevant to your personal needs? Reflect on that.

*This article was first published in 2016.