I am blogging a lot these past couple of days because there has been almost nothing else to do at work. Today is the last day of my contract with ALE, and I leave at 15:00. All of my work is caught up, and nobody wants to assign anything to me with so little time remaining. It makes sense.
Still, this idleness leaves me with time to sulk. I have made a couple of friends here, and I have really enjoyed working with my whole team. I hope to keep in contact, but I know that isn’t one of my strong suites. So I am missing people already.
I am confident about my prospects in the job market. Something will turn up there, even though the recession has ALE laying off more people and other local employers hesitant to bring on new staff. Then there is the issue of subtle age discrimination. I never thought I would live long enough for my age to weigh against me. But I’m glad I did.
I have been walking the corridors of ALE saying good-bye to them and to some of the people who staff them. Who knows? I may be back here in 100 days or so. Silly co-employment strategy! I still haven’t figured out how this helps the company. All I can see is lost productivity. There are more effective and more efficient strategies available. But leave it to ALE to take the worst aspects of two good ideas and complain about less than stellar results.
11 July Update: I found this unposted this morning. I guess I had intended to add a picture or my thoughts at the end of the day, but I hadn’t gotten back to it. What I do remember about leaving was walking out of the building with a bounce in my step only to feel really sad as I started to pull out of the parking lot. I went through this mood swing a couple of times on my way home, where Suna and the kids bolstered me and made me forget about the stress of being unemployed for awhile.
