Posting from an alt account because my current employer is pretty active on Reddit..
So, my last job was with one of the larger telecom equipment manufacturer — the one that used to have a logo of the flaming asshole (yeah, that was a thing). When I hired in, I was working for the product development team converting old UNIX code to code bases that ran on Linux. It was an OK job for being right out of college, but the pay was low (this was right after the dot-com crash), but I did enjoy the team I worked for. Eventually the project was done and they moved me to doing customer installs of 911 systems and call recording systems. LOTS of travel (I was on the road about 3.5 weeks out of the month), but the work was fun, but a tad stressful. I got to see a lot of country I would not have normally seen. The usual cadence would be that I would get an email from a project manager with a customer configuration, get the plane ticket attached to the email, and I would head out a few hours later, sometimes doing 2-3 projects a week.
I was doing the customer installs for about 6 years. The boss that was assigned to me the last two years was a real joke. He never answered emails, phone calls or really was my advocate. I usually interacted with him once a month to catch up on open projects, but he was mostly disinterested. He was the kind of guy that would get $50 per employee from the company to spend on a Christmas gift, but spent it on himself instead. BUT he mostly stayed out of my way. I really enjoyed the team I was working with (even though I rarely got to hang out), we talked all the time and things were fine there.
I was on a complicated install when a company-wide meeting was scheduled. Most of those meetings were pretty useless (they talked about info important to them — financials, stocks, etc), so it was pretty common to skip them. They would usually highlight the meetings that were mandatory, and this one didn't seem like it, so I worked with the customer like I normally did. The meeting happened, and I didn't hear anything, and didn't hear a peep from my boss. We wrapped up the project later that afternoon and I was starting to pack up all my stuff to head to the airport.
My cell phone all of a sudden went to no-service. Didn't think much of it at the time because sometimes you walk into dead spots. I hadn't got my next project or my plane ticket home at that point but sometimes they came late, so I headed to the airport to burn some time. Turned in the car without an issue, and went to the terminal. Cell phone still didn't work, so I popped open the laptop to see what was going on… Laptop wouldn't let me login (account was locked out). As the cell phone connected to the airport's WiFi, it then rebooted and wiped itself. At this point I was starting to freak out a bit. Used a payphone (oh, thank goodness the airport at PHX still had one) to call one of my co-workers, but their phone was disconnected. Tried to call the boss's desk phone but he didn't answer. Tried to call my IT department and they finally told me — I didn't work for the company anymore. Shit. So, no laptop, no cell phone, no access to my email, company travel credit card was canceled, and I was stuck about 2,000 miles away from home. I had already turned in the car and was pretty much stuck at the airport. I think I may have had like $400 in my bank account at that point, so there weren't a ton of options.
Turns out our entire group was laid off. My boss knew this and still put me on a new project anyway. Didn't call me or communicate to me in any manner to let me know — just let it happen.
The best part of the grind was that after I figured out how to get home (combination of greyhound and a car rental, which took me 3 days and just about all the money I had left), the company decided to hold my last paycheck because of a loophole in Michigan's laws that said that if I had a company credit card, they could hold it for 45 days for 'any charges to clear'. They put up a fight with the unemployment office (once I got my hearing, it was a slam dunk, but it still meant I didn't get any money for a while), and I had to take them to small claims court to recoup the money I spent getting back home (they put up a HUGE fight in court because I didn't use their approved travel vendors to get home!). If it wouldn't have been for my girlfriend at the time fronting me a ton of money to get me by with everything being held up, I would have possibly lost my apartment and just about everything else I had going on too.