Both times that I was laid off due to the economy, I embraced it as an opportunity to learn new things and do something different. And although I am a loyal employee, I did leave one company because after 12 years because they put me in a rut of maintaining legacy mainframe systems and I wanted to learn relational databases, Oracle and MS SQL in particular.

I spend an hour every morning before work reading articles and following links to other articles. Many thanks to SQLServerCentral.com and all the people who post articles: I have learned so much from you!