I’m sitting here last night reading through my email when my buddy Bob pops up on MSN Messenger and says he has a question to ask me: “Would you be interested in submitting your resume for a position in my group again?” That would be at Ford, the company that laid me off twice. The second time after only two and a half months on the job. I blink at the screen for a moment and then I type, “Had you asked me a couple of months ago I would’ve said no, but after being in this current job for this long I’m going to say yes.” According to Bob one of the guys in the group has landed a new job with a Japanese company in Auburn Hills so they need to backfill his position so this was a chance for me to get back in if I wanted to.
Needless to say there’s a certain feeling of deja vu to this turn of events as it was last September that I returned to Ford not knowing that Bill Ford was about to step down and the guy who’d replace him would make my tenure one of the shortest lived jobs I’ve ever had. Now we’re a year later and I can’t help but wonder if I’ve managed to wander into a crossover between The Twilight Zone and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip where I end up playing the equivalent of Charlie Brown and Ford Motor Company is in the role of Lucy and I’m forever doomed to have the football that represents a lengthy career repeatedly pulled out from in front of me.
So why am I considering going back? That should be obvious: Money. Well, money and a role that actually makes use of my skill set beyond my ability to walk and press a couple of buttons. Having decent health benefits again would also be nice. There’s no guarantee that I’ll get the position as there’s a lot more people vying for it this time around, but I’m hoping the fact that the big boss already knows I’m good at my job will help give me an edge. It also wouldn’t hurt if he still feels a little guilty about having to lay me off last year.
As for me, I’m more than a little wary of the whole thing, but the chance to get back to the level I should be at in terms of both challenge and pay is too much to pass up even if it is just an attempt to see if they can break their lay off record from last year. Christmas is coming up soon and next spring Courtney will be done with high school so I need to start thinking of where I go from here and having the extra income would be helpful.
Posted on 09/21/2007 at 10:31 AM 
Go for it. You’ll want to be able to say you were actually working down the road if it doesn’t work out. And, you know you’ll be MUCH happier using your skills.
I could be wrong, but it looks to me that if a company that had laid you off twice in the past and still wants to rehire you speaks well for you. Some companies won’t rehire layoffs b/c they tend to come back with a poorer attitude.
My no-work job is, well, not really a blight on my resume, but I don’t want to use the software I was trained on there again. Ever. So it’s like an inch of wasted page space explaining a 6 month gap between jobs that lists company name, dates, and “Programmer”. It irritates me b/c I’m pushing to the 2 page resume point.