Back in the 1980's, there was a common phrase that painfully true -- "Will the last ones to leave Michigan please turn off the lights" -- reflecting a major shift of people out of the automotive industry and Michigan to jobs in the southern U.S. Those days have returned to the Great Lakes State as the domestic auto industry struggles. People, especially young adults, are bailing Michigan much faster than they can be replaced.
Houses aren't selling, and in fact home prices have fallen for the first time in many years. New subdivisions aren't selling very well and new housing starts in this part of the country have dramatically slowed. Thankfully it appears that the bottom of this fall is in sight - but that doesn't mean that there will be any big increases any time soon.
That weakness in the economy has taken its toll on the home building industry and my former employer, one of the largest homebuilders in the USA, made quite a few job cuts during the year 2006. I was one of those cuts in November.
I'd like to say I was surprised, but that would be an outright lie. For months, I witnessed my employer making painful cuts across the country and had a pretty big clue that those cuts would eventually spread to other parts of the company. Even though I was working out of the home office, the majority of my peers worked in another state - in fact my boss was located 2,000 miles away. So when that phone call came, I was about as prepared as I could be.
So now it's been about three months since that's happened. I've avoided communicating about this on the Internet until I could be comfortable enough that I wouldn't type something I'd regret later.
In the coming weeks, I'll make occasional posts about the experience of essentially being fired from a job and how I'm adjusting to a new reality. Although it was officially considered being "laid off", the truth of the matter is that I won't be going back to work for that employer again. Which is a shame, because I liked that job and the people I worked with. It was a great company to work for - but now its time to move on to new challenges.
And in Michigan, finding something to do is indeed a challenge.
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