Good tidings?

Housing starts up 22% in February.

Durable goods orders increased 3.4 percent in February, and purchases of new homes jumped 4.7 percent.

Stock market has rallied and surged 21 percent since hitting 12-year lows.

Could this mean we had finally hit bottom?

Mini trips

I just finished a Skype video call with my future husband, who's all the way across the country right now, visiting friends. I was supposed to be with him on this mini-trip, but I didn't go because I was too afraid of leaving work when everyone is being laid off. (Now's not the time to be gone on mini-trips.)

Then I got to thinking, after we all blew kisses and "wish-we-were-together"s at each other -- what's the point? Why didn't I go? What difference would it have made if I were here or not? If they're going to get to my name on the layoff spreadsheet, they will if I'm on a mini-trip or not. And out of fear I missed a few irreplaceable days with the man I love, and some wonderful people who love us.

I've spent far too many years picking work over the people I love, despite my best efforts not to. And was it out of ambition? Loyalty? Passion for what I do? No. None of the above. It was out of fear. Fear of losing my livelihood. Fear of ending up living in squallor. And worst of all, fear of being dependent on someone else.

My future husband lives in another city, so we do a lot of Skype calling. We'll keep doing it, because we both have to hang on to some sort of livelihood.

Moving on

So I spent a rainy Sunday working on a laid-off colleague's resume. It felt good to do something positive for somebody, to help her think about the future and moving on. It's still incredibly difficult for people who've spent so much of their careers and lives devoted to one company to even conceive of working somewhere else. "We thought we'd be here always. We thought it would be here for us."

But wow -- you should see her credentials. Her experience! Her accomplishments! Until I put her through a grueling exercise to really think about what she had to offer, she didn't understand it thoroughly herself. Maybe this is a first step for her.

I can't find her a job. But maybe I helped give her a powerful new tool for her toolbox: confidence.

Great NYTimes article: how to help a laid-off friend

This is great.

NYTimes March 21

Another bloggee

Don't even know if that's a word, but what the hell.

Give morehansanity your support, huh? Link off to the left.

It's a beautiful spring day where I am. I shrugged all this off and headed to the woods ... crunched through the winter-beaten leaves and listened to the quiet vibration of life lingering just below the surface.

An overheard conversation

"His wife is the ladder-climber, ya know. He's the one who just tags along for the ride. Hee hee. He'll have 30 years in, and nobody will've even noticed."

what? humor??!

We've gotten pretty creative with cost reduction. We've cancelled everybody's cell phones ... turned down lights ... shut off escalators ... switched all the printers to duplex and disabled color ... stopped buying office supplies ... we empty our own trash because they fired the cleaning crews. Piles of trash are stacked up in the hallways in giant bins.


Now people are reporting a significant increase in cockroach sightings. And the guys are complaining that the men's rooms smell because they turned down the water supply that flushes the urinals.



Office Space is alive and well.



Lumbergh: "Since you're down here, it would be really great if you could just sort of take care of the cockroach problem we've been having in here."

Milton: "No, that's not really my job, and I-- I haven't received my paycheck this week--"

Lumbergh: "So, for now, why don't you get yourself a flashlight and a can of pesticide..."

shreds of truth in folklore

So there's a story going around (maybe it's folklore, maybe not) of the HR manager who was asked to write a script to be read to those being laid off. He handed it in to his boss for approval. His boss proceeded to read it back to him, then asked, "Any questions?"

misguided glee

Rumors in the hallway say we won’t have the two-week layoff planned for later this summer. People are nearly tap-dancing with misguided glee. There is no sudden turnaround, folks. What you don’t understand is this probably means something bigger will happen, like more of us will be walking out for good with those overstuffed cardboard boxes.

blogging the blogger and making her my bloggee

Colleague 1 was one of the first to be laid off. The first of my friends, that is, to leave, and that’s when it all started to hit home. She’s writing a blog, too. It’s also linked off to the left.

25,000

Today, the number stands at around 25,000.

25,000 people have walked out the doors. People carrying cardboard boxes packed with family photos and souvenir mugs and a training certificate or two. People walking out with their lunch boxes and steel-toed boots and safety glasses.

Good people. People who did nothing wrong, other than finding themselves in the wrong row on somebody's "layoff" spreadsheet.

Okay, so it has to happen. Nobody's buying our stuff. Everything's dried up. But why so many, why so fast, why does it keep coming and coming like waves of a tsunami?

And when will they get to our names on the spreadsheet?

We stand and we watch them leave, with nothing to say. The void is palpable. The cloud settles like a nuclear winter in the emptying cubicles and parking lots and factories. We turn and go back to work.