An employee of "my" client apparently clicked the "Reply to All" button on an email today. There's no way of knowing that without reading the email, of course, so no one can call it eavesdropping. Without going into the specifics, I will mention something that disturbed me a bit, and that was the phrase "rolled off" used to describe someone's assignment being terminated.
I realize that being unemployed is far less dishonorable than it was a generation ago for the sad fact that it's more common. Career counselors cheerily inform us that we can expect to change careers something like three or four times...as if that's somehow good for anything other than broadening our perspectives. None of that, though, means that I'll ever like the euphemisms for booting someone out the door. Scott Adams riffed on this in one of his books that the term "downsizing" was sanitized to the more Orwellian "rightsizing," and we could shortly expect to hear it called "orgasmasizing."
When you think about it, it's not unlike the way we pussy-foot around the fact when someone dies. (Cue the obligatory George Carlin: "We lost him." [Looks around] "But he was just here a minute ago!") In both cases, the platitudes are designed for the survivors, if only to make them feel that they somehow earned what may well have been dumb luck. Me, I'd rather have it straight up, if only so I can take full credit for my own delusions. And I consider myself lucky that my relatives just "died," rather than "turning into angels" or "going to live with God." That was Mom's doing. Mom also gave me the straight (as in right between the eyeballs) dope on how babies are made. "Lucky" in retrospect anyway: Trust me, the "Eeeeeeewwww!!!" factor with the whole babies thing was pretty high when I was nine years old. I never looked at my second cousins in the same way again. (Which, come to think of it, may or may not have been the point. I'll probably never know.) But you understand where I'm coming from when I opine that it's better to just face the truth up front. Sure, you can outpace the truth for awhile. But when it does catch up with you, you can pretty much bet that you won't be any better for the running.
So let's call a spade a shovel. Most folks who are "let go" were probably not trying--consciously or subconsciously--to get away in the first place. I would guess that they are now trying to remember whether they put any major purchases on plastic in the last billing cycle. Or bracing themselves for telling their parents, friends and significant others, not to mention strangers who may hold the key to bringing in a steady paycheck once again. Or, when the panic has subsided, fighting off the sense of the world moving on without them.
And, while the unvarnished truth won't bring down the unemployment numbers--just as calling a dead person "dead" can't do them any good--it may help to stop desensitizing us to the loss of an income and the effects it has on someone's life.
