Pink Slip Panic

It's been happening all around me at work. Waves of layoffs and office closures, one after another. Definitely a treacherous body of water we're sailing on. And we just got hit with another wave. The vast majority of our already truncated workforce got their notices just last week.  

So this coming week is a series of "bump meetings", wherein you find out who has less time in the books than you, so if need be you could "bump" them out of their jobs--and of course who could bump you out of yours!Survival of the fattest. 

 Then the dust will settle and we'll see a playing field that's once again changed. This happens anyway every couple of years, "budget problems" notwithstanding, a shift in personnel. New faces. But this time it'll just be the old faces who've got enough time on the books to bump into our location.  And naturally, being as that you know all the prospectives,  there are people you hope to see on the new workfloor, and a few you hope not to see there. 

 With this kind of upheaval, the office feels very much like a sinking ship--like the Titanic right after it hit the iceberg.(What am I saying- it is a sinking ship!)You just see all the repercussions coming your way,  the progressive destruction. The air is abuzz with all the controversy and the rumors and half-truths that follow, so you have to exercise caution as to just how much of all this you allow to filter into your own opinions. All too easy to repeat, to reiterate something enough times that it becomes "truth". I think that's also called propaganda...

With 21 years in, I'm not going to get any kind of layoff/bumping rights notice. At least not in this round. But I wouldn't be surprised if I got dinged myself down the road, had my position eliminated out from under me. 

And it is suspicious in this regard(to say the least) that there are a goodly number of position openings in IT and upper management but nothing down at the nuts-n-bolts level where they're most needed. In other words, nothing for my position.

Hmmmm. Might lead you to believe(but again, wanting to sidestep the maelstrom of rumor and half-truth already thick in the atmosphere)that you're being phased out yourself. Who am I kidding- it's a certainty. Just a question of when. It'd be nice to make it all the way to the finish line next August, but if they cut me between now and then, so be it.  

 Freaky times.