Personal Essay
Chris Hartwick
Personal Essay
I have thought about this for a couple of days and I am still wrapping my head around the idea of putting it on paper. Being forty -five, I have a lot of experiences both good and bad but it is not as easy as I thought to pick just one. I decided to pick one that I have been experiencing every day for the last year and a half. At most this is an abbreviated version of my experience. I have been unemployed twice since September 2010. The first job I was laid off for eleven months. I had found a job for eight months with a local aviation spares company in November 2011. I will write about the second term of unemployment and hopefully you will understand my frustration because a lot of the experiences during both periods of unemployment are the same. In June 2012 I left a local company due to a buyout from an aircraft parts distribution company located in Utah. I was asked to stay until the following December and help close our location but with all the stress from the buyout and not being able to tell anybody until we let them go I said I was leaving. I was able to do this on my own terms partly because I am retired military and I receive a pension monthly. Some received some sort of severance package, but not me. I hadn’t been there long enough, so I decided to leave and get a jumpstart on a new career. I guess I consider myself lucky in this aspect knowing that my pension covered my mortgage and my wife Traci has a great job and works with great people that she enjoys very much. I was also receiving my educational benefits from the Veterans Administration to go back to school so the burden was less than what some of my co-workers had to endure. So there I was in June 2012 about the time my kids got out of school for summer vacation and I was unemployed. How bad could this be? I thought. At least it wasn’t in the dead of winter. I decided to take a little time for myself to get my head together over the recent
Personal Essay
I have thought about this for a couple of days and I am still wrapping my head around the idea of putting it on paper. Being forty -five, I have a lot of experiences both good and bad but it is not as easy as I thought to pick just one. I decided to pick one that I have been experiencing every day for the last year and a half. At most this is an abbreviated version of my experience. I have been unemployed twice since September 2010. The first job I was laid off for eleven months. I had found a job for eight months with a local aviation spares company in November 2011. I will write about the second term of unemployment and hopefully you will understand my frustration because a lot of the experiences during both periods of unemployment are the same. In June 2012 I left a local company due to a buyout from an aircraft parts distribution company located in Utah. I was asked to stay until the following December and help close our location but with all the stress from the buyout and not being able to tell anybody until we let them go I said I was leaving. I was able to do this on my own terms partly because I am retired military and I receive a pension monthly. Some received some sort of severance package, but not me. I hadn’t been there long enough, so I decided to leave and get a jumpstart on a new career. I guess I consider myself lucky in this aspect knowing that my pension covered my mortgage and my wife Traci has a great job and works with great people that she enjoys very much. I was also receiving my educational benefits from the Veterans Administration to go back to school so the burden was less than what some of my co-workers had to endure. So there I was in June 2012 about the time my kids got out of school for summer vacation and I was unemployed. How bad could this be? I thought. At least it wasn’t in the dead of winter. I decided to take a little time for myself to get my head together over the recent