The Sixty Seconds

It all started the day Jason feel victim to the juggernaut that corporations were euphemizing as “downsizing.” Jason had been employed by the National Integrated System Software Corporation, commonly known as NISS, in Denver for 25 year as a software engineer and fully intended to remain with the same until retirement. He was proud of the job he had done and felt that the company, in turn, had also been loyal to him. In retrospect Jason could now blame only himself for his naivte – if not just plain stupidity. There was no longer any such thing as loyalty –at least on the part of a company. An employee who was loyal was, if not a complete fool, then at least hopelessly short-sighted. The signs of the time were evident for anyone with eyes opened. The problem was that Jason had essentially been keeping his eyes closed – his head in the sand in good ostrich fashion. He had relied simply on the fact that he was doing, and had always done, a good job – putting in many extra unpaid hours to ensure that his work was top notch. It was almost in a state of shock that Jason packed up his personal belongings and hauled them out to his aging BMW. As he pulled down the picture of his wife, Katy, and his two boys, Jeff and Jim, he felt that he had somehow let them down. There were certificates of achievement and excellence and Jason simply threw these in the garbage. Several papers needed to be signed - then Jason turned in his badge and was finished. He walked out the security gate for the last time and wondered what the future held. Some of his colleagues had been updating their resumes and arranging interviews at other software companies but they had had little or no success as there appeared to be a glut of software engineers in the Denver area. Jason had not even bothered to make up a resume – such had been his confidence. As Jason pulled out of the parking lot onto the busy 50 mph boulevard his thoughts were far removed from his driving. Too late he glanced in the rear view mirror and saw the ten-wheeler bearing down on him at an alarming rate. The vehicle immediately filled the rear view mirror and then there was the sound of screeching brakes. Jason fell the impact of the collision and an instant of searing pain. Then the pain ceased and he found himself back in the line of cars waiting to turn onto the boulevard. He found himself shaking and sweating and a car behind him honked - another angry laid-off engineer wanting to escape the scene. The car in front of him had moved up and the driver behind so Jason inched forward and then pulled up onto the grassy median that separated incoming and outgoing traffic. He then rested his head on the steering wheel and waited for the shaking to subside. He was confused and helpless and needed time to try and figure out what had just happened. He knew that he had been hit by the semi – that much he remembered. How then had he ended up back on the parking lot exit road and not having yet turned onto the boulevard?