A former Google employee in India was fired while on a work-related video call. The employee had spent her entire 15-year career with the tech giant, and she even met her husband there. However, how she was laid off left her in denial. Deepti Krishnan, Google’s HR operations manager, said she kept refreshing the page, hoping that the call had been dropped due to an internet outage.
“Having spent half my life here, Google is the only employer I’ve ever known (such is my loyalty that even my internship was here,” Krishnan wrote on LinkedIn. “I was in denial when I was abruptly disconnected from my video call only to discover I was staring at an ‘access denied’ page. I kept refreshing the page, hoping it was just my internet acting up. When the page refreshed, I saw an email informing me that my time here had come to an end. An image that will most likely stay with me for a long time.”
Krishnan is one of the 12,000 employees let go by the tech giant, and in a note on LinkedIn, she said that while she had prepared for a layoff, it felt surreal when it happened. “The feeling of having to end a 15-year relationship in a matter of seconds.
The emotional turmoil that ensued is difficult to put into words.” “From the smallest of things provoking you to not realising how to initiate yourself at all any more when you meet someone for the first time, from recognising you no longer have a mailbox filled of emails the next morning to observing the Google shuttle go past recognising you can no longer ride in it,” Krishnan said in an emotional statement.
Despite her “deep sadness of being ‘cut off’ in seconds,” Krishnan says Google will always have a special place in her heart. The “proud Googler” has also found a silver lining in spending more time with her loved ones, which include her husband, Navaneetha Krishna. “Thinking objectively about what happened, this is now giving me a possibility of spending bonding time with Nav and spend more time with my family in our residence in Bangalore that we so adoringly built a year ago,” Krishnan wrote.
“Nav and I are off on a two-week trip to Morocco to enjoy our tenth anniversary, and I couldn’t have imagined a more ideal way to get away from the chaos and enjoy a summer break without having to anxiously verify my inbox and pings for anything urgent.”