Tag Archives: redundant

One month to Redundancy Day

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Yesterday was R-day minus one month, the fateful day is approaching with great inevitability. The exact one year anniversary of that very interesting lab meeting, where we went in, to seminar room N9, expecting to get an update from Big Boss about the conference he had just attended. To our great surprise were joined by the Head of HR, the Head of Group (HoG) and some other Human Resources woman (who had just started, we have a huge turnover of HR people, I don’t think they manage to last very long dealing with our obscure scientist problems and our far-on-the-autistic-spectrum personalities).
The horror of redundancy

This all seemed rather strange to our little unsuspecting souls, apparently Big Boss had known for some time that we were going to be culled, but wasn’t allowed to tell us. As far as we knew he had somehow miraculously survived the Review, the previous year. There was some stress around the review time, but then we just forget about it, while at the same time admiring Big Boss’s survival ability. I was always reluctantly impressed that he could keep (just) beating the Reviews, with so little to show for himself, but apparently you can only keep beating the system so long.

The fateful meeting was made even more bizarre because the one missing person was the Trade Union representative. There was a rather awkward period when nobody was saying anything and the Lesser HR Woman was running around trying to locate the one person you would think would make an effort to make this easy for us. Anyway in the end the HoG, a very distinguished scientist, stood up and told us that we might be surprised to hear this (apparently Big Boss had somewhat lost it in front of the director when he was being told) but the lab was going to be closed down.

I must say that if one must be made redundant, our place is probably one of the top ones to have that done to you. One year notice and generous redundancy payment. Still the whole thing was rather unpleasant. I think Big Boss was a little bit worried that I would have a hysterical reaction. But I had been so unhappy in that place for such a long time…..I felt a little bit like a suicidal person being told that they have a terminal disease, it seemed a bit hypocritical to suddenly wail and tear one’s hair out about the injustice of fate.

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Hello World, Goodbye Job.

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The name of the blog is a little bit premature, I am not the Redundant Scientist yet.  But it’s only a matter of time…….the date of my chucking out of science is approaching fast, less than two months to go.  I am going to try to keep the momentous occasion low-key, I don’t think the Powers That Be are planning anything dramatic either, no symbolic breaking of my gilson pipettes to celebrate the end of my career, I am just going to walk out.  Even the traditional packing of all my belongings into a cardboard box will have to be modified, after nine years I have so much junk, I will need weeks to cart it back home. But this is it, after twelve years of almost continuous postdoccing, I am out, and given the structure of scientific careers (or the lack thereof),  can’t really see how I will ever make it back in.

Surprisingly the prospect is not as depressing as I expected it to be.  A few years ago this would be a cause for Major Depression and feelings of Profound Victimization by the Universe.  Mainly I feel relief, years of misery, the War with the Boss, are finally over.  To be honest, I should probably have left years ago, but inertia won.  Overall I’m rather grateful to the Powers That Be that they’ve decided to shut down the program and made the decision for me.

There is only one problem…….I quite like eating, and having a roof over my head, and watching tv, using the computer, buying new shiny gadgets…..I need to make money.  I am actually nicely cushioned, the redundancy pay is generous and I have savings, so I can live for quite some time, watching  episodes of Buffy, Angel and Babylon 5 and generally chilling out.  Unfortunately the money not last till retirement.  The general wisdom says that scientists can easily find well-paying non-science jobs.  But, although my brain acknowledges that the hours of pipetting tiny volumes of liquid from one tube to another are over, I can’t quite accept that and move on, I am even planning to submit a grant soon.   Of-course the chances of getting funding are miniscule.  Still I can pretend that I am only taking a short break from science.  I can’t really contemplate finding a proper job, there is just nothing that I want to do.

But still……need to make money.  I have decided that I will attempt to earn my living working from home, preferably something from the internet, if I must actually work I want to be my own boss!

Here’s some ideas I’ve come up with not necessarily in order of craziness:

  • write a book
  • money from websites
  • freelance jobs
  • sell my photographs
  • online surveys

I thought I would keep a journal on how I’m doing with these different plans, an account of a  fish-finger sandwich fuelled descent to stacking shelves in Tesco and cleaning Emma Harrison’s mansion for benefits.  Think of this as an experiment, how is it going to turn out?What works and what doesn’t?  Will I like it better than having proper employment?