Editorial: Smiling in the face of adversity

How does it feel to lose your job?
Pretty darn awful from what I have seen. I've known a number of colleagues who have suddenly lost their employment and you can sometimes see the despair on their faces, especially those with family to take care of.
I once avoided redundancy by the skin of my teeth when a newspaper I worked for closed down. It was only a well-timed decision to jump ship just weeks earlier that avoided me being on the job market at the same time as scores of other media workers.
Media, like many industries, has gone through plenty of shake-ups in recent decades as we have been forced to reinvent ourselves in a fast-changing world and work ever more efficiently.
If you are not efficient and you are not making a profit, it is hard to survive.
Efficiency - or lack of it - was the problem at the Ovation meat works in Waipukurau, which has signalled that more than 300 jobs will be lost with the closure of its boning plant.
There was not enough stock to process, not enough demand for frozen lamb and the plant was too far from the company's other operations.
You would think that despair would reign in Waipukurau but Hawke's Bay Today found pockets of resilience in the face of the pending closure.
Eddie Spargo, a meat worker for more than two decades, a man who met his wife in the company cafeteria and who has two young sons, was still smiling yesterday.
"I'm going to live life," he said, declaring his likely job loss was an opportunity to retrain.
In the same edition, we reported on a man who did retrain mid-life and is making a resounding success of his new trade.
Napier 42-year-old Paul McDowall quit his job to retrain as a carpenter at EIT. He has just been named Building Apprentice of the Year and told us he absolutely loves his new job.
At the end of a tough, tough week on the employment front, Paul's story was just the kind of individual triumph we needed to hear about.