When your immediate superior and the Human Resources company tool call you up to the quiet room on the second floor, the immediate gut-wrenching, realization is the time has come for the hanging. It usually happens on a Monday or a Friday and they run through a blizzard of well-rehearsed business-speak of severance (if you're lucky) remnants of benefits that will be gone before you know it, and procedures of acceptance.
The bigger corporations may offer a package "deal", an acceptance document that will prove to you this was no surprise to the weasel manager, that it was a long time brewing to cut you off before a raise in your vacation hour accrual. In my case, it was a couple months before my fifteenth year of hire. The others in my wave of dismissal was an older guy just short of eighteen years work, a Hispanic male in his twenties, and a woman a few months short of full retirement, the reward they used to treat with a trip to Hawaii. Rest assured that those Hawaii trips have been monopolized as retreats so deservedly and humbly accepted by upper management every fiscal quarter.
The "acceptance deal" is that they'll give you a week's pay for every year served, penitentiary-style for good behavior. This is unless you sign the document as a revocation, that you have a waiting time, my case was 45 days to ponder litigation for age discrimination. This kicks in as a factor for those dismissed after 45 years old. This is a serious consideration, even if they stacked the demographic deck against you in your group. Again, the game is different for upper management. They're most often offered a relatively nice package that provides a year's health coverage and golf-membership time while pondering how to pay the looming and over-extended bills. Seems these guys always come up smelling like a rose, but the reality may be their ulcers have grown a bit more, less because they are still despised for being career sellouts known for brutal decisions, rather more for how to grovel for starting again at square-one for another heat of olympic ass-kissing. Believe me, they had it much worse than those of us who actually worked.
Acceptance
