Back down to earth with new job,
Farms resident told her firing story

Far from the glamour of the Oscar telecast Sunday night were men and women watching at home across the nation, rooting for “Up in the Air” to win a few awards. These were the real-life victims of downsizing featured in the George Clooney film, about a man who makes his living doing the dirty work bosses are too cowardly to do – firing people.

One of them was Erin Welsh-Krengel from Grosse Pointe Farms. Welsh-Krengel, 31, was happily toiling as a media planner for an advertising agency which served General Motors when the gurus at the one-time auto giant pulled the plug on her brand.

She planned to watch the Oscars with a few friends, but also plans to be at the Woods branch of the library March 16 at 7 p.m. for a special screening.

I have to confess I skipped the movie during its turn at the box office. The concept of a corporate ax man at work in a dramatic comedy made my stomach churn. It would be like turning “Death of a Salesman” into a musical comedy.

But apparently director Jason Reitman, who previously scored with “Thank you for Not Smoking” and “Juno,” knew what he was doing when he advertised in newspapers in Detroit and St. Louis, seeking folks who had lost their jobs in a collapsed economy. He set them in front of his camera and had them “reenact their response to being fired, or, if they preferred, to act out how they wished they had reacted,” as Nicole LaPorte put it in a January column in The Daily Beast.

LaPorte tracked down a half dozen of the 20 folks Reitman interviewed, including Welsh-Krengel.

“I had never been laid off before,” Welsh-Krengel said in a recent telephone interview.

She told LaPorte: “It was a shock. We knew there were going to be some layoffs coming, but I just didn’t think it was going to be me. When I got the call to come down to HR, I was terrified. I almost didn’t want to answer the phone. I’ve never been through that before. I tried not to cry. I tried not to take it personally. But it’s hard to not take it personally if you’re still a person and someone’s telling you, ‘We don’t want you right now.’”

Welsh-Krengel’s husband, who is also in advertising, was laid off the day before she did her filming for “Up in the Air.” “I have a feeling my audition tape was more genuine than I really wanted it to be,” she told the Daily Beast.

After a day of filming at Metro in the McNamara Terminal, Welsh-Krengel was flown to Los Angeles for three days of additional interviews and filming.

“It was a great opportunity,” she said. “Nothing was scripted. Reitman took notes on our stories and it gave me a chance to see exactly what a director does.”

“It was a career change for me,” Welsh-Krengel said of her downsizing. She returned to Wayne State University, where she works as a research technician in the medical school. She had worked there before spending 14 months with the ad agency.

Her only regret might be that she didn’t get to meet Clooney, who flew out the day she did her filming at the airport. “That would have been a good perk,” she said. 

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