Member-only story
Ageism
No One Wants to Hire You at 50
Forget sending resumes; start contacting friends
During COVID many of us were able to work from home and some of us never went back to the office.
Unfortunately, I was not one of those people.
I was considered essential because I worked at a bank and I was in hell.
I got a taste of what it was like “working” from home when I was unemployed for six months after I lost my career at a newspaper. I will never forget that day in May 2019.
The publisher, the executive editor and the HR lady, whom I called the Grim Reaper, walked into the office and requested a meeting with me. When I went into the office, they told me they had to let me go due to cuts. It wasn’t anything I had done wrong, they said.
My hands were shaking as I took the paperwork to sign.
I wasn’t totally surprised. For the past several years, working in that newsroom was like working on the Titanic. You knew it was going down, you just didn’t know how long it would take to totally sink.
Every spring, HR terminated more employees until there was a skeleton crew left to do the same amount of work.
