Blog-off

As of yesterday, I officially became one-in-half-a-million.

One week to the day after the Chancellor presented the Spending Review - uncannily almost to the hour, I found myself in my Director's office being handed a redundancy letter.  This officially makes RedundancyGal one of the 490,000 public sector workers estimated in the Review to lose their job in the next four years.

The fact this happened just one week from the Review makes me feel pretty quick off the blocks - trendsetter some might say. But to all accounts there going to be a lot of Redundancy Sisters and Brothers joining the ranks soon.

Hence the idea for the blog  - somewhere to share laughter and tears over job-hunting blues, career change crises, money-saving tips and just generally bitch about the situation so many of us are going to find ourselves in.

Perhaps somewhere to chat to a few of the other half-a-million.  We can always make plans to go to the park on Tuesday afternoons or get pissed on cheap cider on Sunday nights. Just because we can.

OK - that makes me sound flippant about redundancy - and I'm not.  I'm terrified.  I bounced round the office today all chipper, and then burst into tears when I got home.  And I've got it much easier than most. I'm certainly not flippant about how it affects people's lives. The reports from Ireland about links between suicide and job loss and the Samaritans responding campaign are sobering reading for anyone.


RedundancyGal is genuinely concerned about the changes we are going through and how we all come out of it the other side. So the plan is that this blog malarkey will partly be an account of personal experience, and partly commentary on these strange times we find ourselves in.  

Well peeps, here goes.....