When layoffs happen, they’re often immediate — former employees are shown the door and locked out of their company email within hours. Others are given a few days to tie up loose ends. But in a few cases, the good-byes drag on … and on and on. Sometimes laid-off workers have to stay on for weeks if they want severance and even train their replacements themselves. It’s awkward! Still, you’re getting paid just to keep showing up. Here, three laid-off women share what they did — and didn’t do — with the extra weeks they had to hang around their old jobs.

At the beginning of December, we all woke up to an email that was like, “The company’s closing in three weeks.” I think it went out at 7 a.m. on a Monday. Everyone came into the office and met with their bosses. And then it was basically several weeks of intense senioritis. No one was working hard or doing much of anything. People were openly interviewing for new jobs at their desks. You’d walk by and hear someone being like, “Well, my strengths are …” Everyone was like, “Who are you talking to? Do you know anyone hiring?” There was a sense of solidarity, and no one gave a shit anymore. Even our bosses were getting laid off, so there wasn’t anyone to be mad at — I mean, maybe extreme upper management, but they weren’t in our office.

It was a weirdly fun time to be at work. All the guise of professionalism was gone. We were all in the same boat, using that time to network and stealing company swag. Within a few days, the office supply closet was completely bare. All I managed to get were some mugs and pens.

They also gave us really good severance — six months of full pay. I wound up having a new job lined up before our last day. Frankly, I don’t think anyone was really that surprised that we were closing. It was a start-up and terribly managed, and they just threw money at everything. At the beginning, they were flush with VC cash, and we could do whatever we wanted — I’d pitch a project that would require me to fly across the country, and they’d be like, “Okay!” It was clear that it wasn’t going to last. There was almost this sense of having gotten away with something.

Five weeks ago, a meeting was put on my calendar on a Friday to discuss changes within my organization. I knew that layoffs were coming at some point — our chief marketing officer had told us a few months ago — but I didn’t think I’d be affected. They’d hired a consulting firm to go through and “streamline” certain departments, but if anything, I thought I’d get good news. I’d built a lot of relationships in my role, and I’d heard that the team I managed, which consisted of 20 people, might be expanding. So I got on the meeting — we’re mostly remote — and made some stupid joke and then I saw my manager looking terribly sad. And they said my role had been eliminated and my team would be decentralized. My boss was sending me text messages the whole time like, “I’m so sorry, I had no idea.”

Come Monday, I found out which members of my team had been laid off too, and was completely shocked. One was a top performer. There were huge cuts across the company, almost at random. But no one knew who was safe and who wasn’t, which created more gossip. I got a call from a colleague who was like, “Oh my gosh, it’s a bloodbath.” He started listing all these people who were being let go. And I was like, “Yeah, and me too.” He couldn’t get off the phone fast enough.

Some people were dismissed immediately; others were given two weeks. They gave me five weeks, which I think was an attempt to be nice. But is it nice? It seems like they picked my final date based on the end of the quarter, so that they wouldn’t have to budget for my salary next quarter. Ultimately, it was just very awkward. I care a lot about my team, and I wanted to try to help with the transition as much as I could. But five weeks is a very long time to be hovering and feeling useless, the object of people’s pity. My end date was conditional — I had to stay for that five weeks if I wanted my severance package — but toward the end, I was just hanging around. During my last week, I got an automated email from the company congratulating me on my two-year work anniversary.

I stopped setting an alarm in the morning. If somebody needed me, they knew how to reach me, but I was only working for about two hours each day. There just wasn’t that much for me to do. I live near Disney World, so I went there a fair amount. I did a lot of reading. I went to 4:30 p.m. pilates classes. I’ve been looking at my LinkedIn. I trained for a 10K. I spent more time with my friends, and my dog got a lot of exercise. With my severance package, I technically don’t have to work for the rest of the year. Hopefully I find something new before then. But I also need some time to mend from this experience. I know I was valuable here, but they didn’t care — I was just a number on a spreadsheet.

I’d planned to send out a nice farewell note and put up an out-of-office message on my last day. But then, after I had five weeks to plan it, I got cut off from the system early, before I could do it. After all that, I didn’t even get to say good-bye. Now I just have to mail in my laptop.

When I was laid off and told that my last day would be in a month, I was in such shock that my immediate response was Maybe if I work extra hard before my last day, they won’t actually let me go. It was like a bad breakup where you hope you can change their mind. I had just turned 30 and gone through an actual bad breakup with my college boyfriend, too, so I was grappling with my self-esteem on multiple fronts.

Not that I even considered it, but if I’d left before my end date, I would just get two weeks of severance. So the choice was either get paid for six more weeks or two more weeks — sort of a no-brainer. I was looking for a new job the whole time, but I was also still working my butt off. I stayed in this denial phase that maybe, if I proved myself, they’d be like, “Oh, we’ll keep you on for one more month, and another month after that.” It was delusional.

Some people have the intuition that they’re getting let go. I did not. I was never really given a reason. It seemed like a weird mismanagement issue, though I never really got to the bottom of it.

After I talked to HR, I went back to my desk. I sort of assumed my boss would say something, but she didn’t. So I waited for maybe an hour and then was like, Fuck this, I’m going home. Then I went out with a friend and got really, really drunk. The next morning I was so hungover, but I went into work anyway. And for the next few weeks, I was just trying to do everything as perfectly as possible. There was actually a lot of work to do. I had to finish up all of my deliverables and create a handover memo for all my responsibilities. I was also trying to be strategic. I figured that everyone I worked with might hopefully be a reference for me someday. So I wanted to be in everyone’s good graces.

I had a lot of access to free products at my job, but I didn’t take anything. I was honestly too nervous. I downloaded my contacts and some of my work off the company server, and I even felt guilty about that, which I know I shouldn’t have. At one point I asked my boss if we could say that I was leaving — not that I had been laid off — and she was like, “No.” She was not interested in being remotely helpful. Looking back, I’m so glad I got out of that job. It was such an awful workplace. And it’s wild to me that I was so desperate to stay for as long as I could.

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