My last 36 hours.
- In 4-5pm daily meeting on Monday (that’s a #win by itself), the manager in charge ejaculates a “well, shit!” in the middle of the meeting. Turns out a 7am all-managers meeting was scheduled the next day by the CEO. “That’s never good,” he noted. #obviouslynot
- Tuesday, 6am, I saw this tweet. It was real, and it was not spectactular; seventeen hundred worldwide jobs evaporated, including 350 in Lexington. Gory details here.
- I came into work to a morgue. First and second line managers were going around talking to individuals and my “talking to” seemed ambiguously in the future. I checked on a couple guys from church and both seemed safe, and my small group was praying for my job. There was the appropriate level of gallows humor, but it just felt different than times we’ve done this in the past.
- By ~11am we had an “all building” meeting scheduled in our main conference room downstairs, lead by my boss. The meeting was to be at 2.
- Throughout the rest of the day, people and contractors were told what their futures held.
- At the meeting it was announced that we’re undergoing a reorganization in our area, but we were not offered the names of people who would be departing. We were told that our deliverables for the Fall were not rescheduled or delayed in any way, despite losing a significant percentage of the people responsible for final delivery checklists.
- The remainder of the day was weird discussions with others, hallway talk, and a poignant departure note sent to a department-wide distribution list.
I went home and felt empty. Just utterly empty. . .and I don’t do well with that typically. In lieu of going in for dinner–and probably spewing my pent up emotions at my wife and kids–I grabbed a pickaxe and shovel and dug up some more posts in my back yard Per my Dad’s sage advice, physical activity is often the best stress relief, and it truly helped.
For awhile.
So, today’s a new day, and I’m still stuck not knowing what to do with all this. I’ve endured 8 months of this horse shit, mostly behind the scenes: One farcical no-win assignment, some boondoggles of my own making, a re-org, a layoff, and now another re-org in the wings.
Yay?