The bubble in social networking has burst, decisively. LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian Internet startup, has cut 12 of 28 U.S. employees — and offered them no severance, we're told.

Sequoia Capital, the backer of Apple, Yahoo, and Google, ordered its startups to slash their payrolls this fall. We hear one CEO fired people so enthusiastically he had to retract some of his pink slips.

Time for the laid off to lawyer up. Today, Forbes reported that "white-collar workers laid off amid the financial crisis are using the 20-year-old plant-closing law" that requires employers to either give workers two-months notice of mass firings or pay up with two months worth of severance. With that in mind, after the jump, layoff tales involving grandparents, clerical errors and typos. (As usual, send your stories to tips@gawker.com.)
You Broke Grandma's Heart

Remember last Friday? Laid-off Weinstein company employees sure do. They had been asked on Wednesday to clean up their desks because a "special guest" was coming. Turns out it was HR to tell them they were fired. Surprise! We have more tales from the front lines of the inanity known as "work" (send your own stories to tips@gawker.com.) In this edition, a tale of being newly hired only to be fired, and another reason to hate Gmail chat.
"Evil Fucking" Insurance-Cheating "Bastard":

So the Dow closed, terribly, under 8,000 for the first time in five years, Time Inc's chopping more heads, and we're still looking for your layoff stories! (Send them to tips@gawker.com.) Oh, and? Remember the sad layoff story we you told you about earlier—it was a "post-9/11 husband-and-wife double-whammy"? There's more woe:

This round of layoff tales are dedicated to those fired from Wired, Time Inc.'s European contingent, and Michigan's autoworker retirees who have just had their promised lifetime healthcare stolen. Has Twittering your after-work activities like museums and park strollers instigated jealousy amongst higher-ups? Are you the only one left in your family with a job—only to be laid-off? Have you quit and tried to get your job back? Read on. (And send your stories to tips@gawker.com.)Fired for Twittering Enjoyable Life:

If there's anything more random and inane than work, it's the very randomness and inanity in which we are laid off and/or fired from our jobs. Today is the third installment of Layoff Horror Stories (send yours, or your tales of unemployment-related ennui and depression, to tips@gawker.com—have you put on pants today?) We're about to hear from someone who was informed of their downsizing by the office building's doorman, a layoff that ended up in "one giant ass-fuck, basically," and listen to a rumor that some Conde Nasties have recently resigned themselves to freelancing... web freelancing."no one probably reads either Women's Day Special or Boating"