Economy recovering...but do you know where your job is?
One of my two employers is at it again. They're reducing the size of the organization I work in by 5%. This mostly affects people in Colorado, Oregon, Washington, California. It has resulted in the impending job loss for three people very close to me.
Someone asked me today how I felt about this. I thought about it before realizing that I'm just tired. I'm tired of being angry. I'm tired of being frightened about losing my job. I'm tired of double-talk from corporate management. And I'm tired of others not caring about the things going on in this world.
Online journals are strange things. Possibly no other phenomenon in history has provided more insight into the average every-day thoughs of average every-day people than the world wide web. Wow...thanks a lot for that. Yesterday I read a journal entry from a friend of someone I work with. It was so filled with self-created drama that it made me fear sounding similar in day-to-day life. I decided I would no longer focus on negative things in my life and would instead focus on a balanced view of my day-to-day life...
...then I called to check voice mail and heard the first notification of the lay-offs. Upon VPNing in to read my email, I found out that one of my close colleagues had gotten his walking papers and that I would need to find a new owner for the tasks he was working on. An hour and a half later, I got a call from another close colleague. It sounded noisy where she was at. It didn't take long for her to explain that she was at a bar drinking because she had also been notified that "her skills were no longer needed by the organization". She's a human factors expert focused on improving the customer experience in our products...definitely NOT one of our company's strengths. So apparently, cost-cutting is more important than our customers being able to use our products. Great...just F-ing great.
The big unknown is that I'm not certain my job is safe. I work at home one day a week for health reasons. While I know that some people that had been approved to work the day at home had been specifically asked not to work at home today to make the meeting where they were released, I don't know whether I would have been asked to come in with potential health impacts as a result. This scenario is unlikely, but there is still some risk that I will find out tomorrow that my skills aren't needed anymore either. But I'm tired of fearing it and I'm just, literally, tired. It's time to go to bed and find out in the morning whether I'm still going to have this job or not.
