early retirement?

I don't think I can pull off early retirement as well as Zac has in his past.

Yesterday at about 9am our VP of Inventory Planning called 3 of the 4 of us left in shoe buying.  I looked around for the 4th person of our team thinking we were going into a meeting but was quickly sent into the office.  As soon as we walked in we knew what it was since the HR lady was sitting in there with packets with our names on it.  It was an odd feeling, I thought this has to be a mistake but then I saw my name on the packet and I attempted to look at the other names on the packets.

Because of cash flow the company decided to shut down the shoe book.  So they managed to call away the one remaining shoe buyer while they led the 3 of us into the slaughterhouse.  They told us we could collect our things and they would appreciate if we would leave right away, we could come back later in the evening to collect the rest of our things.  Probably 5 minutes later our VP came over and told us we needed to leave.

So we collected what we could and walked out and then waited outside to see who else would come out.  We hear all in all 14 people were laid off, mainly people that had most of their job relating to the shoe book.  Our severance pay was a measly 2 weeks compared to the people that were let go 2 years ago that received a weeks pay for every year they worked for the company and there were quite a few people that had worked there over 20 years.  The two ladies that were let go in my department with me had both been there almost 30 years and they left the company with 2 weeks severance.  Now that really sucks but at least they go something.

Rumors going around is that the parent company will try to file for bankruptcy....again....but they have to wait till next year.  So our guess is that they might make it through the rest of this year and then perhaps they'll move this catalog business somewhere else or they'll close this portion down.

Even though we all knew this was coming I was preparing myself for a November layoff.  So it came as quite a shock that it was yesterday. Overall though it wasn't surprising we knew it was coming for a couple years now, we were all just waiting for our time to be let go.

The hardest part is saying goodbye to these people that I've met and gotten to know so well these past would have been 6 years come November.  My resume has been up on a couple job site places for a few weeks now but the only calls I've gotten are for insurance companies and one call from Dillards as a sales associate. I've applied for a couple jobs so far knowing that I probably wouldn't fully qualify so now it's on to find another job because I can't have Zac whoring himself on the streets even though I know he really wants to help me out!

Oh well....onto the next adventure of lame bosses and work drama!