I did not have to, since they did it to themselves.

I was working for a company where I became the only person who knew my job since everyone else had left who knew it as well. For six months I had let management know that we needed more people trained to do this work since I was the only one left. If I left or even took a vacation for a week or two, they would have problems.

Next they were thinking about laying people off. So management was shifting work over to me that single people handled so that I could do the work. This meant that I was the only one who had access to the data on my computer and knew where it was located. Anyway it was a good sign the management was planning on keeping me around.

We knew the layoffs were coming, and we were told when it would happen, but not who. The morning of the layoffs they informed us that the president of the company the night before decided that HR would handle them and the choice of who will be laid off. Of course this was now done strictly by numbers in a book and not by what a person contributes.

So during the middle of the day my manager gives me a tap on the shoulder to come with him to HR and to power down my computer, right now. Then sign paperwork, pack my stuff up and out the door I went.

So the work I was doing did not transfer to someone and was shut down in the middle and no records of where I was. Also no records of the work I was doing. No one knew how to do some of the work I was doing. There was a bunch of stuff that I only knew where it was located and what it was called when I left. Plus the company had a habit of not making backups of information being deleted off a person’s computer and out of their network account. Some stuff they considered important or required for FAA was stored in a safe place, but most of my stuff did not fall into that category. It had to be kept separate to save space on those servers.

Let’s just say the people that I talked with after leaving were not happy that I was one of the people laid off. Laying me off cost them a lot of time and money.