Dec. 24--Getting laid off has long been one of life's loneliest experiences.

People are singled out, stripped of their professional identities and escorted out of buildings where some have spent most of their adult lives.

But watch out. As a wave of layoffs washes over the United States and beyond, some of the pink-slipped masses are going public, fighting back with satirical songs on YouTube and rapid-fire Twitter streams read 'round the globe.

"I want to help relieve tension, make people laugh and give them hope by letting them know they're not alone," said Michelle Millis, a usability consultant who wrote a song for laid-off colleagues at Yahoo and posted it on YouTube on Dec. 10, the day Yahoo axed 1,500 people, or about 10 percent of its work force.

Millis' song, a twangy off-color tirade in the style of Dolly Parton, follows two other less raunchy odes to Internet companies posted on YouTube by the France-based employees of AOL and eBay. After AOL France fired 90 of its 140 employees last year, they proceeded to gambol around their offices singing about lost love. Earlier this month, the eBay employees vamped to Jerry Herman's "I Am What I Am" and Abba's "The Dancing Queen."

In years past, Silicon Valley had a somewhat harder, more anonymous edge when it came to layoffs. In the mid-1990s the employees of Silicon Graphics set up a "bad attitude" mailing list as the iconic manufacturer of high-performance computing workstations

shed its staff.

"The Bad Attitude newsgroup was a continuation of a tradition started at SGI: It was an anything-goes forum for venting. It was a place to get things off your chest in as inappropriate and vitriolic a way as you felt like. It was for catharsis, and telling the truth without fear of reprisals," Jamie Zawinski, a legendary programmer responsible for early versions of Netscape Navigator, wrote on his personal Web page in 1998.

A few years later, disgruntled employees of imploding dot-coms took their gripes to a Web site with a name unprintable in a family newspaper, a takeoff on the magazine Fast Company, that let them vent anonymously. At its height the site was getting 4 million visitors a month, and its founder, Philip Kaplan, was being treated by the media as the spokesman for the layoffs.

But by 2008, anonymity seemed pointless. In January, Ryan Kuder, a senior marketing manager at Yahoo, became a minor celebrity after he posted deadpan updates about his termination to Twitter, a microblogging service. Overnight, the number of people following Kuder jumped from 87 to more than 400.