Layoffs

After being with my company for 2+ years, I've lived to tell the tale about my first round of layoffs.

You know how some people sometimes say that layoffs are a good thing? A way to finally cut the fat that needed to be cut long ago? This isn't that. My company cut the fat a long time ago. They've been cutting into the meat for a while.

This was more than meat. This was to the bone. This was taking the limb clean off. This was cutting off your nose to spite your face.

I missed the magnitude of the first shockwave because I was working from home the past couple of days due to my flu. I called into a department meeting, expecting to be told yet again that there would be no raises this year. I guess I should have seen the writing on the wall. Over the phone, you could tell that my manager was trying to avoid eye contact when he said the word "layoff".

It was quite a tense half hour between the end of that call and the beginning of the next one when my manager fortunately told me I was safe. However, because I was at home, it was basically a cone of silence all day. No whispered gossip of who had already heard they were safe. No one wants to be the person to put it into text.

Now everyone seems to quietly walk the halls like zombies. We're all kind of lost. Schedules and deadlines are a mess. No one is really sure of who remains and what their job is anymore. On the project I've been working on for the past two months, the person who I was supposed to hand it off to is now gone. Along with his entire department. Yet, I chug along.

My dad, who had worked for this same company for 30+ years and fortunately survived too, said he's never seen it this bad. It is bad.

I've always joked that I didn't see my company surviving the next five years. There's just so much mismanagement by the high up bureaucrats that it's always felt like they are working against us. It was just a joke I made, but I'm really afraid that it's coming true now.

This was a watershed week. It has yet to be seen if this is a beginning of a new chapter or the beginning of the end.