Actually, they want to get rid of you as fast as you want to get rid of them, even if you feel they’ve done you wrong. Chances are, they’ll tell you to have a lawyer look over the agreement before you sign it. They’re not telling you this to be nice; it’s the law.

That is probably the best advice they’ll give you, and they probably don’t think you’ll actually follow through, because if you did, you’d find out how horrible they are treating you. I understand, you want to take the money and run. But don’t let your former employer trample you like the Next Top Model tryout. While you might think it’s great that they’ve offered to pay your COBRA health insurance benefits for a year, which is a common benefit in severance agreements, it’s not such a great deal if you take the time to analyze this benefit the way lawyers do. COBRA is temporary insurance that employers are obligated to offer you after termination.

If you leave voluntarily, it is up to you, not your former employer, to pay the premiums, which are priced at group rates, making them lower than if you had to take out a new health insurance policy. In a severance agreement, your employer may offer to pay your COBRA premiums for up to a year, which is a benefit for as long as you remain unemployed. Once you find another job that offers health insurance and take it, the benefit stops, so it’s not that big of a benefit if you’re lucky enough to find a job in, say, three months. It would be better if you could negotiate an all-cash settlement that would equal a year’s worth of COBRA benefits.

This amount would be in addition to what your company believes you’re worth for your length of service, which isn’t very much. That amount varies, but it’s probably somewhere in the neighborhood of one or two weeks’ pay for every year of service. As we know from reading about golden parachutes, chief executives receive obscene amounts.  If you want more, don’t ask. Get a lawyer to ask for you. Your employer is not going to give you more because you asked nicely.

Another benefit in most severance packages is payment for out-placement counseling. From what my lawyer told me, this benefit is only worth about 50 cents on the dollar since most people don’t take advantage of it. Again, if you can get this amount, which should be about $4,000 to be worthwhile, paid directly to you as part of an all-cash settlement, so much the better.

You also hear that if you try to negotiate your severance, your employer will yank the agreement altogether leaving you high and dry. While that is technically true, employers don’t want to put themselves in a position of getting sued, which this behavior would leave them. They want you to sign the agreement, which will also contain clauses that require you to promise not to bad mouth them. Make sure the clauses are reciprocal. You don’t want them trashing you when a prospective employer asks to speak to your former employer for a reference.

My severance agreement reminded me of an article about landlord-tenant leases I had written when I worked for my college newspaper. Like the leases I wrote about, the severance agreement was one-sided and onerous. It took away all of my rights to file a lawsuit and didn’t provide an inkling of protection from the company bad-mouthing me. Its language was enveloped in prose that insisted it was offering me a “generous” severance. Yeah, right. Friends said I was lucky to get severance, but I think it’s the right thing to do, even if a company isn’t legally obligated to provide you anything and thus making the post-exit experience much worse than divorce.

Through word of mouth, I retained a top-flight employment firm within days of my firing because, if the company was going to play hardball, so was I. I felt discriminated against because of my age and pending surgery, which I had delayed because a procedure to lessen the pain had seemed successful. Moreover, I was still sorting out doctors because the one I had chosen was not in my health insurer’s network of doctors, making me potentially liable for thousands of dollars.

My lawyers said they’d write a letter to my former employer about the numerous anti-discrimination laws they had violated, along with a settlement request to compensate me for the company’s misdeeds. I had no idea there were so many civil-rights laws to protect jilted employees. Some of the laws include the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, and the D.C. Human Rights Act, which has got to be the most fearful from an employer’s perspective because it doesn’t cap damages.  When the lawyers accepted my case on contingency, it validated my belief that I had been treated badly. In retaining legal counsel, I felt as if I had stood up for myself. I wasn’t seeking retaliation but fairness.

Severance is meant to alleviate some of the stress associated with finding a new job. From my perspective, I was left high and dry, given that the holidays were approaching, and no one was hiring full-time employees in the face of a recession. Surely, no one at the company could have thought that I would find a job between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I had a managerial position that I felt created a moral obligation for the company to award me enough to get through the holidays and beyond. During that time of year, you not only think about how you’re going to pay the bills but fulfill your children’s wishes for presents because that’s what they’re used to. You don’t want them to suffer, too, when they’re not old enough to understand. As it turned out, we used gift cards from Target, Best Buy and Borders, and I gave my older son the Marie Antoinette ejector head doll.

Three days later, I returned to my former place of employment to retrieve my belongings—a bike, posters, kid pictures and a few books. Nothing much, and things I could live without, except for my son’s artwork. I did want that back. I wasn’t so sure I’d be riding my bike again, given my bad back and now no good insurance to repair it. But it was worth retrieving, because maybe I could always sell it.

Rush hour had passed, but I ran into bumper-to-bumper traffic, which took me longer than expected to drive downtown. I pulled up in the parking lot at 8 PM and looked for the HR director, who was waiting in the office lobby. As I turned off the engine, the only thing I could think about was getting my belongings as fast as possible. I still couldn’t believe that a place I once found so welcoming could turn on me like a rabid raccoon. The HR director-in-waiting escorted me to my cubicle. She was friendly enough and a bit hurried. We didn’t chitchat, not even about the weather. She said the office manager was busy overseeing the clean-out of another office mate who had come to get her stuff. She had brought some empty boxes and asked if I needed anymore. I said I didn’t think so.

She left. My computer was on. My email account was still active, but the password, not surprisingly, had been changed. I decided to see if I could delete some more email. The IT department had been smart enough to disable that function. However, I could still export my contacts to a file, in between looking like I was busy cleaning out my drawers.

I thought about getting caught and what they would do to me. They could further humiliate me by calling a security guard to watch me clear out my desk, or they could pack my belongings for me. But I gambled that I could take what I needed off the computer without getting caught because in an odd sort of way they still must have trusted me; otherwise why wasn’t there a guard standing over me?

Although I couldn’t delete email from the inbox, it appeared that I successfully deleted a mail folder. But I’ll never know. I also launched Internet Explorer and deleted all of my browsing history, cookies and so on. I sent another folder in the My Documents directory to the Recycle Bin and then emptied it. In between, the HR director checked on me, but the office manager was too clueless to notice when he came into my office and my hands dropped away from the keyboard. That’s the one advantage of working for a company that is technologically backward.

My computer skills are sharp, and I could have done major damage to its file-sharing server. But that would have been stupid. I’m not stupid, and I’m not revengeful. Given my third-degree treatment on the day I was let go, I thought the company would have posted someone inside my office as I cleaned it out. In Howard Gardner’s 1993 book, Frames of Mind, he introduced the theory of multiple intelligences. My strengths were linguistic and intrapersonal intelligence. They help me regulate my life.  The company’s collective smarts obviously did not include totally out-foxing someone of my caliber.

Two hours earlier, my boss had sent me email saying she would like to see me in her office at 4 PM.  When I’d walked through the mailroom earlier, I’d passed one of my usually friendly colleagues who drew a pained look on her face that made me feel like she knew something was up but had to keep her mouth shut.  Her body language spoke loudly, but at the time it didn’t register at a deep enough level.

She worked in finance and must have known my fate. But my boss’s email had concerned a report that I’d recently completed and praised its valuable insight.  After something like that, who would suspect they were about to walk into a plane propeller?  Like a good employee, I hung around.

Back in my office and suffering a sugar low from the candy, I looked up to see the head honcho framed in the doorway. He had never, ever come to my office before.

“Ann,” he said.   “I want to see you in the conference room.” My stomach tightened when I followed him down the hall to where the second-in-command was already seated at the table. My boss wasn’t in the room. I knew whatever he was going to say had to be bad and surmised that I was about to lose my job. Our eyes locked when he said in his soft-spoken voice that the company decided to eliminate my division, making me one of 10 employees to lose their jobs. My jaw dropped, but I didn’t say anything until the end when I asked him when my termination was effective. I didn’t see the value in being combative or trying to convince him he was making a mistake. He told me I had to leave “right now.” I then asked if I could get my belongings the next day, and he said no. I had to arrange a time with HR to come back at night.

I didn’t believe they would fire me after I’d told them that I needed back surgery. What was I going to do about insurance?  I was also a single mom over 50 and thought that would protect me

Walking out of the conference room, I kept thinking how could they? But they had. I was offered a meager severance for my several years of dedicated service. I felt ambushed and angry that they didn’t know the true value of the person they were letting go.

No one else at the company had my expertise about the Internet. With me gone, they were exposing themselves to technicalities that they couldn’t begin to understand. I also felt that the real reason they gave me the boot was because I was taking advantage of benefits, which could raise their insurance premiums. I knew I would fight back. They dealt me a raw deal, and I wasn’t going to let them get away with it.