“I track analytics on my portfolio site, and during that entire week I was supposedly being considered, it had zero visits. No one even looked.”

I worked for a national brand — one that's been a fixture in the public eye for over 100 years. The kind of company that, if you asked anyone, would bring back fond childhood memories. The kind you'd assume held strong values and treated its employees with dignity.

That illusion ended with an 8 a.m. phone call telling me my job was eliminated. My health care was cut off immediately, too. Thankfully, I had my wife to lean on, and her support carried me through the transition.

What I still can't get over is the company's unspoken rule that no one should reach out to those who've been laid off. My manager — someone I invited to my wife's and my 25th anniversary party, exchanged Christmas gifts and birthday wishes with, hosted for dinner more than once — never checked in. Not once. Meanwhile, several coworkers did reach out, offering that simple act of kindness. I'd been through a layoff before at a different company, and I genuinely believed this person was different. It's a hard lesson in how loosely people throw around the word “friend.”

It stings that someone I considered a friend didn't care enough to ask how I was doing. But it's made one thing clear: a 100-year-old company can still value profit over people, and management can be just as disingenuous as anywhere else.

Apparently, I was just a number in a headcount.

For the record — before anyone assumes I had this coming — I had glowing performance reviews for all 14 years I was there, and I was steadily working toward a role I expected to hold until retirement.

It's been over seven months since that day. Hundreds of applications later, the closest I've come was a single phone call with a hiring manager, who told me a marketing manager would be reaching out to schedule a follow-up. That call never came. When I reached back out myself, I got an email instead — the marketing manager had reviewed the resumes and portfolios and gone with someone else. What genuinely angers me is that I track analytics on my portfolio site, and during that entire week I was supposedly being considered, it had zero visits. No one even looked.

I could blame AI. I could blame leadership's blindness to what they were losing. But I won't blame myself.