Cold Winds

Went out just now to buy bread. It’s -2˚ C with a vicious 25 mph wind, but sure enough there were two baby carriages parked outside the bakery, with at least one containing a shrieking baby. They were still there when I came out a few minutes later. There’s a fine line between “quaint Nordic custom” and “child abuse.”

Haven’t had a lot of travelogue-worthy material lately, hence the lack of posts.

The big news in our world the last few weeks was the layoff at M_______t. We’d been reading the rumors for weeks, but we thought our team was safe—surely there was plenty of fat to trim elsewhere. But then last Friday, just after the CEO’s announcement, we hosted a delegation of bigwigs from the home office who led off by telling us how their hearts went out to us, and we knew we were anything but safe. For a minute I thought they might be closing the whole facility. Well, it wasn’t quite that bad—about 80 of 330 positions, or about 25%, were being eliminated. That’s a pretty drastic layoff. I’m more used to the 10-15% variety.

We were informed that in Denmark, employers are legally required to meet with an elected committee of employee representatives before doing a layoff, and so the meeting concluded with an election, or rather several elections from the various teams. The committee was authorized to negotiate aspects of the severance package, but not the list of people being hit. Because of this interesting legal wrinkle, the execution date was pushed out to Thursday the 29th—six days later.

The next week we heard regularly from our committee representatives and prepared ourselves for Thursday. J. & I thought it very possible that one or the other of us would be affected, and considered the possibility of returning to the U.S. this summer without jobs, health insurance, or unemployment benefits.

For whatever reason, management agreed to extremely generous severance—with barely 11 months tenure I would have qualified for five months’ severance; J. with her decade and a half would have gotten over a year’s pay. Then there was the matter of moving expenses. For many international employees, no job means no visa and no viable way to stay in Denmark. So for affected individuals, they offered $10K for each adult family member and $2400 for each child. I think that would be sufficient to get a houseful of stuff home.

If we’d both been hit it would have been a nice payday—people have made fools of themselves on network TV for a good deal less. Ultimately, though, the ongoing gig is probably a better alternative. As it turns out, neither of us was on the list. This may be just a temporary reprieve, and we may yet regret not being on the list.

All in all, our employer handled this reasonably well. Some of our friends and colleagues were affected and we feel bad for them. We’ll miss them too.

I had to shelve my daydreams of free days in Copenhagen (until July), sitting in cafes drinking coffee. Actually, the coffee drinking would have to be done on park benches, from a thermos, since the unemployed should not be spending $7 for a cup of coffee.

Which reminds me—we had a rare dinner out Friday night. It had been a hard, cold week, and we were in the mood for some red meat and dark beer. J. looked in the guidebooks for “brew pubs” and we picked the Norrebro Bryghus. We like the beer from this brewery and, after walking into a brisk wind (there’s always a brisk wind in Copenhagen) liked the look of the place—modern, spacious, crowded, with the requisite big steel vats behind a glass wall. The hostess said we would have to wait an hour for a table, so we stood in the bar and watched France eliminate Denmark from the European handball championships while drinking $11 beers. After about 45 minutes we were summoned upstairs and took a look at the menu. Bad news. This was not pub food. First of all, like many restaurants in Denmark, you had to order a three- or four-course meal. No a la carte. Secondly, they would not allow us to order Louis a bar meal from downstairs. So at that point we were facing 3 x 325dkk = 975dkk before beverages, which is $200. Two entrees: fish or venison. The fish had lobster sauce, which meant that J. could not eat it. We were hungry and tired, but we decided to bolt.

We got a little lucky in the end—found a place a few blocks away called Café Klimt, where we all got burgers. I thought mine was delicious. With beverages, the meal came to 410dkk—about $80. That’s practically free!