could be worse

On Friday, I had the best job loss experience of my career. It followed 3 months of my boss and colleagues being nice to me. (Sometimes they showed disturbingly bad judgment, but they were consistently nice to me.) The company's finances depend on selling stuff to big US auto manufacturers. So this is a hard time for them, generally. My boss, and everybody I talked to, said they were sorry to lose me, and wanted to have me back sometime. It was a nice thing to say, and I was not too depressed to believe them.

Some of the people I talked to revealed an interesting class bias. It was bad enough that the company was laying off all those temps in manufacturing. (But that was somehow ok. These things happen.) "But you're different! You're an engineer. It's not right for the company to get rid of somebody like you, all of a sudden like that." I know it was kindly meant, and it was encouraging as such, but it was still a little uncomfortable.

So I am starting a new job search, yet again. It's always scary, but at least this time I am not starting in a state of crushing depression and the belief that I can't do anything right.