Your mother should know

‘We work for the company that looks to the future’ Blur – Yuko & Hiro

After the initial shock of Friday night and Saturday morning I have alternated between ‘yes, this is great, I was leaving anyway & now I get a huge fat cheque’ and ‘shite, what are we going to do if I don’t get a job straight away? Will we last on Duncan’s part time money?’ It’s been an emotional rollercoaster as ever in my head.

Ultimately I am being positive, in that I was planning to get out of here anyway and this just pushes me to that point. I had planned to stick it out another year just to get on the damn course, but never mind. Unless I can stay in the company & get on the course that way I might just have to face up to the fact that I will not be qualifying as a journo any time soon. The money will envitably make the whole thing sweeter, but to be honest I just want to know now. I don’t want to spend the next 6 to 8 weeks waiting for the day that we are told who stays and who goes. I’m even considering speaking to someone about voluntary redundancy, but of course it depends on whether I’d get the same amount of money.

But the other thing I now have to consider is a change of career, or rather career focus (it’s not like I’ve ever really had a career plan at this stage). There are two publishing companies in the North East; the major one is of course my one & the second, slightly smaller one, is based in Darlington & Stockton – both a minimum of 30 miles away, which pretty much rules them out. (I’m not even realistically considering such a long drive again.) I could go into something like marketing, but as with any change now I’m likely to have to start at the bottom again, which is annoying when you consider that in London I was editing a site.

I always thought that our jobs were relatively safe. You could say I’ve been very naive. After the national sites were closed I honestly believed them when they said the regional sites were their focus and everything would be ok. Redundancy is something that happens to my dad, or that happens in the manufacturing industry, it’s not supposed to happen in the media industry, let alone in the internet side of it all, an area that we are told is going from strength to strength in many ways.

Which just goes to show that not only should you not believe the hype, but that we are all vulnerable.

Until there is a next time…

xx