https://www.vanityfair.com/news/amie-parnes-jimmy-finkelstein-the-messenger
I spent weeks agonizing about it. I talked to colleagues and friends who said I almost had to take the job. After all, I knew the owner, and he had never let me fail. I had hours-long conversations with my parents. I talked to Bob who emphasized the durability and steadiness of my current job.
But mostly, I talked to Jimmy.
“As a single mom, I have no net,” I emphasized on each call with him to the point where even I was tired of hearing it. “If this fails, I have nothing to fall back on.”
During some of those calls, I remember pacing the room, on the outlines of my rug, as if I had been walking an actual tightrope. He was reassuring and had the confidence of a man who never had to worry about the balance in his checking account.
“You will be fine,” he told me again and again. “I will make sure of it.”
When I was having those conversations with Jimmy, I never once thought that the site would implode more than eight months later.
But here we are, and obviously, I am not fine. Neither are the nearly 300 colleagues of mine who lost their jobs in the most cruel and inhumane way imaginable, without warning and without a day of severance. Typically, employers offer COBRA, as a way of keeping your insurance for many months after termination, but ours will be pulled at the end of this month.
Future employers don’t readily have access to our work because the site has been shut down.
For me, it has been the ultimate betrayal.