The Redundancy Blog: Welcome

A spectre is haunting Britain — the spectre of redundancy.

So what do you do, you're mid-twenties, you've been working since you graduated then wham, bam, you're pushed off the career ladder to freefall?

Well, that's a tad dramatic. In my personal experience, my redundancy experience was like a dream come true. I would voice the hopeless desire of a fat pay-out without the obligation to work, to everyone who would listen. I had reached a point in my professional life that had become utterly untenable.

My job was as a copywriter but in reality due to bad management, a lack of direction and any true organisation I had ended up on a failing project, writing uninformed posts on a mobile phone blog. X, oh X you were the great white hope. You were the site that would revolutionise the mobile phone industry. A price comparison site for mobile with a web 2.0 sensibility. But most people don't need to buy mobile phones online as they are tied up in contracts and upgrade when they need to and there's about a gazillion mobile phone shops on every high street. Failure was inevitable. After a million pound investment, the weekly 1k in revenue was enough of an incentive to keep the company backing this wounded beast.

But it wasn't just X that was failing, out of all the web publishing projects my company started all of them failed. It was like the anti-midas touch, everything we touched turned to stinking human excrement. It was such a shame, considering the other part of the company was so lucrative, so successful. It was if the publishing division was the dead, rotting corpse of a siamese twin attached to the vital healthy brother. One needed to be amputated to save the other. Publishing had to go. Well, not all of publishing but the crap projects were shut down and investment was severely scaled back on others, meaning yours truly, another writer and a front end developer were canned.

I'd been there 3 years, my boss felt guilty and the company was making average 100% profits each year, meaning I got a fat, and by fat, I mean an obese settlement. I may not need to work till at least September. If I was more frugal I could extend this period of no-work till the new year.

When he told me the "bad news", I tried not to cry out in joy or come in my pants. My dream had come true, but now what? I don't need to work, I can do anything really. This level of freedom rarely comes in anyone's life and my head is swimming with possibilities.

Today is my first true day of unemployment. The last week have been spent in a beer soaked, ketamine-tinged blow out. It is a week since I've been made redundant and the first day I've not been suffering from a severe hangover, or drug-induced stupor.

Anyone else out there who is in a similar position please email you your own stories. Also what the fuck should I do?