Employee gets let go after 17 years, now receives incessant calls from former coworkers asking for help: 'If the company needs my knowledge that [badly] they can rehire me'

This loyal company man gave nearly two decades of his life to the business, and yet somehow, upper management thought he was expendable.

This is what happens when there is a change in leadership and no one with authority seems to actually have a strong sense of who is good at what they do. When upper management makes assumptions based on vibes or simplistic data without taking a moment to spend real time with employees, mistakes are often made.

Unfortunately, this author was a casualty of this kind of poor decision-making. Everyone on his team knew that he knew all the ins and outs of the operational structure of the company… except for new management. In fact, he was the go-to person for training all the employees in his department when they first joined the organization. Not only did he know how to do his own job, but he had a pretty strong sense of how to do everyone else's as well.

When he was unceremoniously let go during a round of layoffs, the author was completely blindsided. His boss with whom he had formed a healthy working relationship, was part of these layoffs as well. Even before his final moments in the office, the author had an inkling that he would be needed soon thereafter. After all, no one knew what they were doing without him.

At first it was a simple phone call. A coworker contacted the author to ask if he remembered how to file something. Then it was an email, a message, and another phone call. Before long, the former employee was being contacted by his ex-coworkers every week and sometimes multiple times a day, always regarding how to do something he was no longer paid to do.
While the author concedes that he always got along with the folks on his team, after a while, he started to resent them for this. Eventually, it got to the point where he had to say something and put his foot down. If he is not going to be rehired or brought on as a consultant for his former company, then he had no time, desire, or energy to continue to support a business that took him for granted. Talk about not know what you've got until it's gone!
via Vitaly Gariev

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"[Would I be wrong] for refusing to answer any more questions from my old job after they laid me off"

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