2012-07-09T19:37:00.000-07:00

UnemploymentBleaux

The beginning

Ok so I this is how a 50 something goes from a successful employed financially secure person to unemployed and close to being broke and homeless.

I am a retired Air Force Veteran with a college degree in software engineering. I work as a function software test engineer by training and trade.

The new year of 2009 started out sunny and bright I was employed at long term contract doing what I loved testing software and documenting the results. My youngest daughter was back home from a couple years away doing her own thing. July bought the birth of my fourth granddaughter her parents and our family was delighted and overjoyed with her arrival. She was perfect in every way her great grandmother was even able to make the trip out to Washington to meet her.

The first indications that things might not be such a great year after all my daughter the new mom was notified at 6 weeks after the birth of her daughter that at the 6 month mark she would be shipped out on a deployment with her Air Force Reserve Unit to Iraq.

The Fall and Winter of 2009 started off fairly normal my 23 year old daughter had steady employment I was employed we lived in a house that I had owed since 1989. September I was informed that the job that I had been employed at as a senior software test engineer was secured until the end of the year when the contact was being renegotiate.

November brought a panicked phone call from my daughter near Joint Base Lewis McChord AFB her childcare arrangements were falling apart for her reserve AF deployment to Iraq. She had three girls at the time twin 3 year old girls and a 6 month old girl. Her husband is a police officer for one of the local cities and works a 4 on 3 off rotating night shift schedule. So I started looking into options for care for the girls while he was at work.

The beginning of November also bought news that the company that I was working for had to severely cut back staffing on the contract that I was on. I was one of the ones that was being cut and at the end of December I would be out of a job. By the end of November things were now going from bad to worse. The daughter in Washington could not find suitable child care for her three girls while her husband was working. The final blow came on November 29 of that year. Four officer of a local police force were gunned down while preparing for work a local coffee shop. This sent my daughter into a total panic as to what would happened to her three girls if something were to happen to her husband while she was overseas.