A former Google employee in India was fired while on a video call for work. The employee had spent her entire 15-year career working for the tech giant, and she had even met her husband there. However, the way she was fired left her in a state of denial. According to Deepti Krishnan, who oversaw Google’s HR operations management, she kept refreshing the page in the hopes that the call would be dropped due to a network issue. As per Krishnan’s LinkedIn profile, “Google is the only employer I’ve ever known (such is the loyalty that even my internship was here).”
“I was in denial when I eventually realised I was staring at an “access denied” page after being abruptly disconnected from my video call. I kept refreshing the page in the hopes that the problem was with my internet. I was now looking at an email telling me that my time on this page had expired when the page refreshed. A memory I’ll possibly have for a very long time.” Krishnan, one of the 12,000 employees the tech giant decided to let go, wrote on LinkedIn that while she had mentally prepared herself for a layoff, the reality of the situation still felt surreal.
The layoff left the same sensations as having to quickly end a 15-year relationship. The emotional turmoil that followed is difficult to put into words. On a tearful note, Krishnan continued, “The next few hours were probably the hardest hours of my life. From the smallest of things triggering you to not knowing how to introduce yourself anymore when you meet new people, from realising you no longer have an inbox full of emails the following day to watching the Google shuttle go by knowing you can no longer ride in it.
Google will always hold a special place in Krishnan’s heart, despite the fact that she feels a “deep sadness of being ‘cut off’ in seconds.” Despite her loss of time, the “proud Googler” has spotted a silver lining as she has been spending time with her family, including her husband.
Seeing as Nav and I have been living apart for more than five years, Krishnan wrote, “Thinking of what happened objectively, this is now giving me an opportunity to spend quality time with Nav and spend more time with family in our home in Bangalore that we so lovingly built a year ago.” I could not have envisioned a better means of fleeing the chaos and taking a vacation without obsessively keeping an eye on my inbox and pings for anything urgent. Two days into this, Nav and I are off on a two-week trip to Morocco to celebrate our 10th anniversary.
Just like millions, Krishnan too got laid off by one of the biggest tech firms. Despite the shock and sudden loss of her job and the possible helplessness, she felt when she was laid off, she saw the silver lining just like many others. She now gets to see and spend time with the family she couldn’t properly impart time to due to her demanding schedule. This is just a way of showing that no matter how devastating, the layoffs aren’t the end of humanity and all who lost their source of income, It depends if this is a blessing or a curse purely on the way we approach said situation.
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