I woke up this morn­ing, and Vinny was gone (he was in the shower), and I thought, shit, he left with­out me. But then, he would have left with­out me because I was laid off on Mon­day, and I don’t have to go to work any­more. The Secret works.

I called in sick on Mon­day; I had a migraine that would kill an ox; not the first time. The headaches have been more fre­quent in the last cou­ple of months, and I haven’t fig­ured out why, although I’m think­ing they were because of my job. I checked my e-mail, and was going to send an e-mail to every­one telling them that I was out sick that day. Instead, I found a mes­sage announc­ing a manda­tory com­pany meet­ing at 9:30 a.m. Oh, wow. The last time we had one of those, they announced lay­offs. So I sent a mes­sage to K and J and asked them to let me know what was going on. Then I went back to bed.

A cou­ple hours later, I woke up and checked my work e-mail. No responses. Then I noticed that my e-mail was frozen because my inbox was full, and now that I think about it, it was a weird coin­ci­dence that my e-mail inbox was full and blocked the day that I was laid off, or was it a coin­ci­dence? So I sent a cou­ple e-mails from my gmail account, and I got replies really fast. One of them said that there were indeed reduc­tions: 270 peo­ple, 40% of the staff. Whoa. That’s mas­sive. Then I called the VP, and the first thing he said was, you were part of the reduc­tion, and you need to call HR. I don’t think I’ve ever dis­missed a VP before, and cer­tainly not as fast as I did him. He was all like, sorry, not a reflec­tion on you, I wish you the best, yadda yadda, and I’m like, save it, get me out of here. I was lit­er­ally wav­ing my hand at thin air in my room like he was stand­ing in front of me and I was shoo­ing him away. I wanted to find out what I had to do next, not hear some­thing insin­cere and canned. I’m so turn­ing into my mother.

I went in to work yes­ter­day to sign the papers and find out what the whole pack­age was about. It was the first and last time I’d ever been to Bldg. 249. It was my last day at work. The pack­age is nice. I’m on paid admin­is­tra­tive leave and on full pay­roll and ben­e­fits until May, at which time I will become unem­ployed. Later this sum­mer I’ll receive a sev­er­ance check, my stocks will vest, and I’ll have a tight lit­tle sum of money to stash away. And there’s always unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits, too. I should be able to max out the ben­e­fit. And if I do it right, I should be fine for a while.

Seri­ously, this is weird. I haven’t been unem­ployed since 2003, and even then it was only a cou­ple of months. I always have a job. I’m always work­ing. I haven’t been laid off since 1995. I always leave on my own, I never wait to be laid off or fired. But this time, even though I knew my job sucked, quit­ting with noth­ing else in my favor would have sucked worse. I wouldn’t have the pay­checks or the sev­er­ance or the unem­ploy­ment. I made a choice to stay in a shit job until the com­pany decided what to do with me. I decided to let them make the move. I was patient, and I was going stir crazy.

I have to find some­thing cre­ative to do with my time. I have to find a pur­pose again. And that’s great. For so long, I’ve been stuck in a job I hated and which didn’t even need me, and now I’m free. I think it’s time to move on from biotech and do some­thing more inter­est­ing, more fun. What, I have no idea, but we’ll find out. I’ve got plenty of time.

So, next up, $32 mil­lion. Nice round num­ber. And why not? What do you say, Universe?