A Day of Mourning

Yesterday was so long and so traumatic that when I got in the shower this morning, it seemed like about 72 hours had elapsed since the last time I was in the shower.

About 10:30 yesterday morning, the director of development asked the other technical writer and me to come into a conference room. I thought I was going to get my hand slapped for accessing the internet for non-work-related stuff. Instead he told us that our boss had just been fired. Seriously? My boss is brilliant. He's an excellent technical writer, a compassionate manager, and an all-around good guy. He was able to bring a note of humor to every drudge job we did. (And there's a lot of drudge to technical writing—trust me!)

The director also told us that three other people were being let go. In fact, as we were sitting there, my best buddy was also being let go. Oh, stab me again. There was only one person at that company who was anywhere near being in my generation and with whom I could talk classical music and what it's like to live in the National Capital area. Every Friday morning for the last few months I've bought two of my Friday morning pastry and delivered one to my buddy's desk as a pat on the head for having lived through another week in an environment that wasn't real friendly to him. Each night as I left I told him good-night. As I walked past his cube on the way out last night, I had to steel myself to not cry.

So of our workforce of about eighty people, we're now about 5% lighter. The workplace was very strange yesterday. Very little work got done in the afternoon; most people were standing around outside their cubes just chatting, and no manager objected. It seemed like the HR types were wandering around telling jokes, trying to distract everyone from the death in our midst.

(The other two guys who were let go? One I knew by name; the other just got married a couple of months ago. Talk about inserting stress into a new marriage. Oh, and my buddy? Has a new baby daughter, about three months old, along with three boys and a stay-at-home wife. Have I said enough to alert you to his stress level?)

My two newly-jobless friends will find work quickly, I'm sure (I hope)(I pray). But my worklife will not be the same.

I'm in mourning.