I have a wife, a child, a mortgage and more debt than I would like to admit to. The concept of being layed off was one of the more scary things in my life: I take my role as The Provider(tm) very, very seriously. And I was suddenly very frightful of our future.

My old job fired me without even so much of a one day notice. They called and said "As of this morning, you have been terminated. All your accounts have been disabled*." (It was not, I was promised, my fault. It was a purely fiscal decision). They did, however, provide a severance package.

For the next five weeks I was practically in a state of continual panic. It wasn't that I doubted my own abilities, but I could not help the flood of "What ifs" that bounced around my head.

I did everything you are suppose to do: I applied for every job I could, I applied with every head hunter agency I could. I networked with other people (and asked their help) every chance I could. That took two weeks to do. After that, I had to do the horrible: I had to just sit back and wait for the calls. There wasn't really anything left me for to do; but let me tell you: being idle while the days pass and the bank account shrinks is not an easy thing to do.

So I gardened! :) Visited my wife and son at school a lot and took care of tons of projects around the home. Keeping busy in that way was definately the way to go. It was just SO HARD to not be able to do MORE to help the job hunting along; but I just needed to wait.

As of yesterday I have at least one job offer and two interviews. Things are OK now; but the wait was scary.

The moral of the story: Do everything you can; but when there is nothing else left to do, TRY to relax. Be constructive and get stuff done. Oh! And try not to fight with your spouse! And, sex helps push back that black cloud of doom that grows over your head, too.

* I was sysadmin for a collection of Unix boxes. They didn't even scratch the surface of all I ways in I had :)