Month: January 2014

Lara and I walked over to Ted’s Bulletin for breakfast the morning after I was laid off, and I couldn’t resist the Walk of Shame burrito.

With extra green chile.

Increíble.

And I spent most of the rest of the day getting my technical house in order. Against my better judgment, I decided to stay with Microsoft Outlook instead of migrating my insanely extensive contacts and email archive (about 5 gigabytes of data) back to Apple Mail and Contacts. It took a little work, but so far, so good. I decided to go for Office 365, a cloud-based approach that charges an annual fee and allows you to load the Office software on multiple computers.

After some back and forth, I managed to set up a new email account, bbenz@opposable-thumbs.com, and get my computers and iPhone all synced up from an email, calendar and contacts perspective. It took a lot more swearing and gnashing of teeth than this paragraph would lead you to believe, but in the end, my technology was settled.

And so was I.

My walk of shame was pretty low key. It wasn’t even 8:30 a.m. yet, so there weren’t many folks in the office to see me collect my stuff, grab my coat and shuffle toward the elevators. In my 30 years of working in media, this is the first time I’d been laid off. But as I walked home (yes, I was working in an office that was a 10 minute walk from the Logan Circle row house we’re renting), I starting looking at the situation as an opportunity. My former employer had been fair with my termination package, so I have some time to sort through things and decide what’s next. I also made a vow:

I’m going to make the most of this transition. 

The afternoon was spent securing a new phone and switching my number to it. Conveniently, this could be done at the Verizon store across from Shelley’s Backroom, my favorite D.C. cigar bar/watering hole. While I waited for the Verizon folks to connect with my former company to do their magic, I smoked a Padron 3000 maduro and downed a pint of Guinness. I then collected my phone and went home to meet Lara for dinner at another of our D.C. favorites, Bistro la Bonne on U Street. Great French fare without the hype that is screaming up and down the 14th Street corridor (not that I don’t appreciate Le Diplomate when we manage to secure reservations).

With a belly full of moules frites, we walked over to the Gibson, a speakeasy that can be tough to find if you don’t already know about it. No signage. Dark hipster vibe. Insanely good cocktails. The ascot-clad bartender whipped up a mescal-based concoction that proved the perfect nightcap for the first day of my new life …