Relief, and sorrow

I am still employed.

Not entirely sure why, at this point; let’s look at the reasons I had to be hopeful.

The 2008 numbers are up The person who crunched the numbers is gone.

My manager wasn’t called upon to axe people My manager is also gone.

But the axe is now done swinging, and it bit deep throughout our department. Between today’s layoffs and the voluntary separation offer that went out at the tail end of last year, we’ve lost 10 people out of 40-45.

I’ve heard that other parts of the company are getting hit harder.

And the PA just called for medical emergency response team to the area where they’re offering the next-step career counseling – so either someone just had a breakdown, or someone went postal. Probably the former, but the latter is not completely without precedent.

This has been a brutal day, during which I have seen far too many hard-working and dedicated people, many of them friends, join the ranks of the unemployed.

Those of us who are left have a meeting in a little over an hour, during which we will presumably discuss how on earth we’re all going to structure our work from here on out. It probably won’t be pretty.

But I will be here for it, and for that I am very grateful.

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The Other Other L Word

The prospect of impending layoffs at Xerox has been weighing heavily on all of us here in the last couple of months; ever since it was announced that the company was seeking to cull roughly three thousand employees from its workforce, most of us have wrestled with the unanswerable question “will I be one of the three thousand?”. While this constitutes about 5 per cent of the total workforce and thus gives people the knowledge that there is about a 95 percent chance of being just fine, that’s still not a comfortable enough margin for anyone to feel secure. However, the questions will soon be answered – L-day is at hand.

Tomorrow, an unspecified number of Xerox employees around the globe will be provided with boxes in which to pack up their desks.

Indicators are good for my team, in the following ways:

• The 2008 numbers for e-commerce are up compared to 2007.
• The higher-ups continue to hand us project assignments that stretch well beyond tomorrow.
• The meetings during which certain managers were informed that they would have to cull people did not include my manager.

However, those are not cast-iron guarantees of anything.

So if you happen to like me, and not be secretly plotting my demise or anything, I would appreciate good wishes tomorrow – perhaps a prayer or two if you are so inclined.

If, on the other hand, you are secretly plotting my demise, but in a manner which involves a nasty copier-related “accident”, you still have cause to hope for my continued employment, so I would ask the same favor of you.

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