Reduced In Force

Peter Hornby • December 16, 2007

I think we all knew it was coming. The Reduction in Force (RIF) happened on Thursday, and I was one of a substantial number of people laid off from the Unisys engineering facility in Mission Viejo, California. The other two plants, in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, were similarly affected.

How do I feel? Well, after 30 years, it’s a shock, even though I’d been more and more convinced that I was going to be affected. But, overall, I have a tremendous sense of relief.

I write those words “after 30 years”, read them back, and there’s a sense of astonishment. How did I end up working for a single company for thirty years? And how would I have ever left without this layoff? I suspect that the answers are related. It becomes comfortable after a while, even if the job changes, as it did for me on many occasions. You see the same people, people who are also lifers, you understand the way things are done, you feel a sense of satisfaction at seeing organisational structures repeat themselves. In other words, you get tired and cynical, and I think that’s where I’d arrived at. But, that said, I don’t see how I’d have left on my own. That security blanket is very warm and comforting, and the alternative seems challenging, not to say frightening.

But that’s where I am now, with a sudden open space in front of me, after decades of walking a path which had become darker and more overgrown. Is what I see a meadow or a desert? Time will tell, and I’m excited at the prospect of finding out.

But, in the short term, I’m going to take a little time off, and consider the next couple of months as a mini-sabbatical. Lorraine and I might take an extended east coast trip to see friends in New York and Philadelphia, or maybe we’ll visit her birth city, Montreal.

It all starts on Monday. For the first time since June 1977, I’ll wake up with no thought of Unisys, a part of my life which is now complete. Let’s see what happens.