[Fiction question] HR reps: what are your thoughts about outprocessing laid-off workers?

I’m not an HR professional.

I got laid off once ‘out of the blue’ and once during a bloody massacre when the company laid off 30% of its workforce in a day.

The first one was such a shock—and was the first time I had ever been voluntarily laid off—that I hardly recall what was said. Maybe ‘shock’ isn’t the right word here, but “surprise”. The HR Director was nice (she always was) and professional and calm, and I certainly wasn’t ‘upset’, but not all ‘there’, either. So I had pretty much ‘no reaction at all’ that I can recall.

The second time, well, we saw it coming, but still…

I was interviewed and laid off by the VP of the Department (HR was understandably overwhelmed that day), and he actually cried. For me. I had been hired just a year before, having left another job to take this one, and had moved across country. He knew all of that, and he was upset that things had gone to hell so badly—and I had so little seniority—that this was inevitable for me. I ended up consoling him that ‘it isn’t so bad’ and ‘i’ll be okay; don’t worry’. Funny, now that I look back on it.

Strangely enough, I’ve laid off hundreds myself.

When you work as a timekeeper / field accountant on a construction project everyone there knows that the job is going to end one of these days. And those layoffs typically happen in waves of dozens or scores of workers in a day, and no one thinks twice about it. They knew when they started the job that it was just temporary, until their phase was done, and then they’d be going ‘back to the hall’ (union labor) and wait for another call-out to another project. So I’ve handed out those pink slips to countless individuals, more often than not with a smile and a handshake and a “See ya’ on the big job, guy.” (The big job is defined as “the one with 2–½” handrails”. (The joke there is that handrail is uniformly sized at 1–½” diameter pipe, so a ‘big job’ ... well, you get it, I’m sure.)