February 24, 2003
11:47 AM

The Walker gets her Walking Papers


First I found out I was safe from a disterous fire at my favorite rock club, and now I'm safe from my company's -- to use their euphamisms -- "reduction of current workforce" or "eliminated number of positions".

It all started today with seeing Ken by the elevator, on my way to lunch. "Well," he said, extending a hand to shake, "Goodbye." This didn't mean he was going out for his lunch break or even vacation. I knew exactly what it meant. "You're, uh, you've been -- let go?" He mentioned a few others who were laid of today.

I got to the cafeteria and sat at two connecting tables filled with other folks from the office: QA, developers, DBAs. And I got more names. I was shocked. I couldn't believe that all these incredibly knowledgeable people were being let go. Especially RH and BF. Our team will be pretty fucked the next time we have questions on those parts of the product that those two guys answered.

I walked over to the table where the group of nurses were sitting. I said "glad to see that YOU'RE still here." They've always been a nice group to work with when I had to do QA for the clinical stuff from time to time. It also gave me a break to work with people outside of our tiny QA team. But I sat down with them and mentioned the layoffs. And I said I had to be careful; I saw my manager come into the cafeteria. (She's NEVER there, and always brings her own lunch in and eats at her desk every single day...so I knew something had to be up, whatever it was.) Anyway, they were pretty shocked, if not disgusted. They knew that letting such knowledgeable people was not going to improve the financial situation, and if anything it will screw the product's development.

Elizabeth told me off-record that she was bailing in 2 weeks herself, but by her own free will. "Hmm," my libido thought, "That means she won't be a co-worker anymore, and thus not an elimination in my dating pool!" In all seriousness, I think we've had a mutual crush on each other. She's definitely older than me, maybe late 30s to early 40s, but she's divorced, and DAMN I always thought she was hot. Maybe she's just an extroverted friendly person, as many of the nurses in our company are in stark contrast to the programmers. But I still may very well not be reading her wrong.

We also saw Molly leave right after lunch with her bag. I didn't want to jump to conclusions, though. You never knew if some of these people were just going out for lunch, a common practice given our remote office location. But Kole brought me into her office to give me the official word, and the expected morale-boosting talk she has to give.

Did any of us see this coming? Well, some of us did. We did hear the rumor that 6% of the whole company was going to get cut, which is exactly what happened. And in talking with Anita, Harry, and Daisy, we all said that if one of us was going to get canned, it should damn well better be Molly. Even aside from our total dislike of this lady, we knew she'd be the one to get canned. She probably made more money than any of us, being a contract-to-hire. She didn't really have many skills beyond the basic level QA stuff (surface-area bugs, writing test plans). She definitely did the least amount of stuff than us, particularly with her "disabilities" and constant trips to the treadmill and walks around the entire building. It was getting to the point where people from other departments had to tug us to the side and ask "What's up with that lady who walks around the entire building all the time?" Anita told me that it was all Greg's decision, and that Kole had no say in it. Greg probably knew that Kole had been covering up for her for too damn long.

While I'm not going to miss Molly, I'll sure miss some of the other folks. I talked at length with Russ. I gave him my home email address, to drop me a line. He wasn't all that sad, really. He had gotten disillusioned with the whole restructuring thing for a long time. This just wasn't the same company he started working with 5 years ago. He always thought Mike's layoff was bullshit too, and had a lot more to do with personal feelings from his manager, given the fact that Mike had just received a company award for his performance, and rave reviews from the other people he worked for and with.

Well at least tomorrow will be brighter. Because unlike many who dread age, I've always enjoyed celebrating my birthday.

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