A former employee of Google in India was laid off while she was on a work-related video call. The staffer had worked with the tech giant throughout her entire career spanning 15 years and had even met her husband at Google. The manner in which she was laid off, however, left her in a state of denial.
Deepti Krishnan, who handled HR operations management at Google, said she kept refreshing the page hoping that the call was disconnected due to an internet problem.
"Having spent (almost) half my life here, Google is the only employer I’ve ever known (such is the loyalty that even my internship was here," Krishnan wrote on LinkedIn.
"When I was abruptly disconnected from my video call only to realise I was staring at an ‘access denied’ page, I was in denial. I kept refreshing the page hoping it was my internet that was acting up. When the page refreshed I was now looking at an email informing me that my time here was up. An image that’ll likely stay with me for a long long time."
Krishnan is one of the 12,000 employees that the tech giant decided to let go and in her note on LinkedIn, she said that although she had prepared herself in case she had to face a layoff, she felt surreal when it actually happened.
"A feeling of having to break up from a 15-year-long relationship in a matter of seconds. The emotional upheaval that followed is hard to describe in words." In an emotional note, Krishnan added, "From the smallest of things triggering you to not knowing how to introduce yourself anymore when you meet new people, from realising you no longer have an inbox full of emails the next morning to watching the Google shuttle go past knowing you can no longer ride in it, the next few hours were likely the hardest hours of my life."
Krishnan added that although she feels a "deep sadness of being ‘cut off’ in seconds", Google will always have a special place in her heart. The "proud Googler" has also spotted a silver lining as she has been using her newfound time in being with her loved ones including her husband Navaneetha Krishna.
"Thinking of what happened objectively, this is now giving me an opportunity to spend quality time with Nav (we’ve been in a long distance for over 5 years) and spend more time with family in our home in Bangalore that we so lovingly built a year ago," Krishnan wrote.
"Two days into this, Nav and I are off on a two-week trip to Morocco to celebrate our 10th anniversary and I couldn’t have asked for a better way to get away from the chaos and enjoy a vacation without having to anxiously check my inbox and pings for anything urgent."
Read more: 250 Google employees walk out of Switzerland office to protest layoffs: Report
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