A funny thing happened to me at work on Thursday- the company folded.

There I was walking around the office, handing out the layout of the just about to be mailed out upcoming issue and I was called into an office-wide meeting. And just like that, laid-off, as was everyone else in the company. Which is why I found myself Friday morning, three days after getting a job, once again lying in bed and watching Dylan confront Andrea over her almost affair with another student while Jesse was busy taking care of the baby. It's my fourth layoff, third since I turned 30, and fifth loss of job. I was kind of excited over the possibility of setting a new record for quickest layoff in layoff history, but then I remembered that at one of my old jobs, someone got laid off her first day, the head of the company suddenly changing his mind as to whether an international sales person was needed. D'oh.

God, I love the layoff meetings. All the tears and apologies, discussion of severance packages and COBRA payments, and the sheer utter shock of it all. I should know because I've been through so many of them. My first sort-of real job after college was temping at a major long-distance phone carrier. After months and months of layoff rumors, rumors so pronounced the CEO had to send out a video-taped message saying layoffs weren't going to happen (hah!), they brought the entire Department into a conference room and broke the news. I can still remember all the people crying at the announcement and the laid-off VP of the company, a gruff ex-Israeli tank commander during the Yom Kippur War, slamming his fist on the table at the fuckedup-ness of it all.

Stupid me was actually beginning to get into working again. I even started paying off some bills. I had a kick-ass ergonomic chair, a big cubicle space, a lap-top computer, and a phone that was so cutting edge I had no idea how to work it. And despite all my bitterness towards how they had treated me, I was liking it there. I still didn't really trust the bosses, but everyone else in the company was really nice and kept telling me how glad they were that I had been hired. That morning I had even earned major thanks for completely revising something, an easy little thing to do that quickly made everyone's job a little easier. And that afternoon I was supposed to meet with the Web guy and learn how to post stuff up on the company Web site.

There goes that.

I guess I can say I kind of saw this coming. Red flags were flapping all over the place. Hell, that morning one of the bosses sent out an e-mail about a company-wide conference call but cancelled it a few minutes later. That's a pretty big red flag. And having been through all of this way too many times before (as pretty much all of San Francisco has), I knew all the signs- the closed door meetings, the grumbling about money, the sudden concern with cutting costs. Hell, I saw this coming when I first interviewed with them when I couldn't help wonder about a company that rented an entire floor in a San Francisco office building (23rd floor no less) yet had only fourteen employees.

But still, I had hope. They wouldn't have hired me if they didn't think they were going to cease to exist three days later, right? And besides, just because I have paranoid concerns about something doesn't mean it's not going to happen, right? A psychiatrist once tried to tell me that things like pessimism and paranoia are only mental constructs, things that happen only in the mental wiring and have no bearing whatsoever with reality. Which makes me wonder, if that's true, why is it that when I usually have that paranoid feeling about something, it comes true?

Friday morning I realized that I'm starting to watch "Charmed" episodes for the second time. All I can say is that you know you've been unemployed for a long time when you've lapped yourself on reruns of a show that has been running for six years and up until October you had never watched before.

Ugh.