Please go read the rest of it. The story is short. What is so touching is that this person had originally wanted to be an astronomy but he went into banking out of a sense of family duty.My brother lost his job today. No. That is a sterile way of saying it. Today, the big, highly profitable bank my brother worked for for the greater part of his late 20s and early 30s, rendered him expendable. No. That is still yet a sterile way of putting it. Today the big bosses in their fancy suits said "you're fired. You have two hours to pack your things and go. Things are just not working out." And my brother, a defiant, proud, dignified man, had to obey. Even in the age of "socialist government," the corporation rules. Please do not let anyone convince you otherwise.
The day before today, my brother and his coworkers drank and ate together, watched a baseball game together. They laughed together about his discomfort at the changes taking place in the bank, sometimes at his expense, as a result of the changing financial times. "Oh you are just being paranoid. Things are fine here. Everywhere else they are going down the tubes, but not here. We are different," they told him. Then they canned him. Then they took away his livelihood. Then they disappeared him.
And so the global financial crisis hit my family, and I - my brother's baby sister - came to know, like so many others, the personal anguish that supposed impersonal corporate decisions wreak. I know it is not anything new.
It is truly horrible to lose one's job. You have no idea how horrible until it's happened to you.
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I have actually applied for a job in British Columbia because of the very problems which this story so sadly underscores; and though my job is "safe" (for now"), I have lost more than one job in the past and so have decided to have "plan B" in place as soon as possible. It's my own little insurance plan.
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