When I picked up my phone last Tuesday morning, two messages caught my attention. One from a colleague said she'd been laid off, and another from HR asked me to check my personal email. My throat tightened. I found myself among the 14,000 corporate employees laid off by Amazon . I had just celebrated my one-year anniversary as a senior social media manager at Amazon Ads and it was exactly a week before my birthday. Talk about timing. My immediate reaction was disbelief. Was I still dreaming?