Work, Careers and Ambition

Story · all 20 words

Eleven Years and a Cardboard Box

I was made redundant on a Thursday morning in an office I had worked in for eleven years, along with thirty-nine other people, in a meeting that lasted eleven minutes.

The thing nobody prepares you for is that being made redundant is not the same as being sacked, and everybody in the room knows this, and it does not help at all in the car park.

I had joined at twenty-four on a temporary contract covering somebody’s maternity leave. It was meant to be five months. My CV at that point had one relevant line on it and a great deal of white space, and I was, I now understand, the cheapest applicant on a list of about sixty.

They kept me on. Then they kept me on again. It took four years and two restructures before anybody gave me a permanent contract, and by then I had stopped asking, which is possibly why I got it.

That was a place where you really could work your way up, which is rarer now than it was. My first promotion came at twenty-eight and involved managing two people, one of whom was eleven years older than me and considerably better at the job. My second came at thirty-three. The training for both was, in total, one afternoon.

I was not ambitious in any way I would have recognised at the time. I simply did not leave, and staying turned out to be a strategy.

By thirty-five I was running a team of nine and had become the person who knew where everything was, which is a real form of power and completely invisible on a CV.

Then the company was bought, and the new employer already had a department doing what my department did, in Reading, more cheaply.

They were decent about it, as these things go – proper notice, proper money, and a woman from HR who had clearly done this many times and was kind in a practised way. But there is a specific feeling that comes with carrying a cardboard box past people who still have jobs, and I would not wish it on anybody.

I was forty-one and I had never once had to look for work as an adult. My entire career was a series of things that had happened to me in the same building.

I applied for eleven jobs in four months. I got two interviews. In one of them a man of about thirty asked me why I had stayed somewhere for eleven years, in a tone suggesting it was a symptom rather than an achievement, and I did not have a good answer ready and I have had one ever since.

What actually saved me was somebody I had trained in 2011, who had left to go self-employed and rang to ask whether I would do three days a week for her on a part-time basis while she was too busy to breathe.

It was supposed to be temporary. It has been six years.

I never went back to being an employee. I invoice four different companies now, none of which would ever have taken me on as a full-time permanent member of staff at forty-one, and all of which are perfectly happy to pay me by the day at forty-seven.

I would not have chosen it. I did not resign, I was not brave, and there was no moment where I decided to hand in your notice and strike out alone – that story is always told by people it worked out for, and I was pushed.

But I earn more than I did, I have never once been to a meeting about a meeting, and I no longer belong to a profession so much as to about nine people who call me when something breaks.

I have no idea when I will retire. There is no vacancy to leave behind and nobody will hand me a card. That frightened me for about two years and now it does not.