November 18, 2009, 9:16 a.m.

After 10 years at "Prison Media" my career came to an abrupt halt with a phone call.

November 18, 2009 was a Wednesday: A regular, plain old, normal Wednesday. I was working at home like I typically did on Wednesdays. But then the phone rang at 9:16 a.m. and that phone call changed everything. I could see on the caller ID that it was a work number, but it wasn’t a number I recognized, which is very telling now.

Me: “Hello?”
Other end: “Hi Kate, this is Boss.” (My boss. Interesting that in the past year he had called me so few times that I didn’t even recognize the number!)

Me: “Hi, Boss.” (Somehow I knew that this wasn’t a good news type of call. “This is bad” I remember thinking to myself.)

Boss: “I’m here with Queen Bee (pause) “This is really bad” I think to myself. “And HR Robot.” Now the picture came into focus. "Ah-ha, this is really bad for ME.”

Queen Bee did all of the talking. She started out with the really big news: I was being laid off. She followed that with some sort of explanation, but I didn't hear it. I think I tuned out the rest of what was being said to me. All I heard was the Charlie Brown Teacher voice “Blah, blah, blah.” When your boss, his boss and the HR director call you, it’s obvious why they’re calling. It was almost surreal. I was thinking to myself “Wow, this is actually happening to me. This is what this call feels like.” Then I looked at the clock and tried to decide if it was too early to crack open a beer.

The Queen Bee told me afterwards that she thought I had maybe been tipped off, since I was so calm about it. What did they expect me to do, cry? Beg? Plead? Personal Motto: No matter what, never let them see you struggle.

I hung up the phone and I felt crushed and humiliated, but then I felt relieved and free. When the Husband showed up that night with flowers and a giant congratulations card, I knew I would be fine. There were tears, which is rare for me. But, they weren’t tears of fear or sadness. Nope, they were pissed off tears. I was so angry that I didn’t get the chance to tell them to stick their job, which was in the cards, but still a few months away. I was so mad that I had given so much and ended up here. And I was stunned that I never saw it coming. The Warden did a great job keeping this news under lock and key for almost a year.

The next day, I worked in the office and met with the HR Robot. She presented me a letter that started off with:

Dear Kate,

The decision has been made to eliminate your position.

The letter then proceeded to spell out what was planned for the next 3 months. And I didn’t like it.

Basically, my job was being outsourced to India (freaking India, are you kidding me?) and I was being asked to stay and help with the transition. Um, wouldn’t that be like my husband telling me he wants a divorce, but asking me to please stick around and help him find a new wife? Of course my answer should be no. Good grief, I do have SOME self-respect. No paycheck is worth the humiliation of training a bunch of foreigners to do your job. I mean really, did I want to spend three months of my life on the perpetual phase out, interacting with a bunch of job stealing suck ups who use English as a second language? Besides, I’m a person of principle. And based on that alone, there’s no way I could stay. No amount of money could have bought my integrity. You can call me a lot of things, but a sellout isn’t one of them.

My decision turned out to be the largest moral dilemma of my life. Was I insane to walk away from three more months of employment in the worst economy in 80 years? Would staying and meeting their demands make me the ultimate loser in the game of corporate politics? I had put up with so much already, would three more months really kill me? Should I swallow my pride and do it? Is this really how I wanted to end my career with Prison Media? It took me two weeks to decide.