It Ain’t Happening

It’s been exactly one month since my former employer gave me the ol’ boot on the ass due to budget cuts.

And since then, I’ve been in touch with a former coworker who continues to give me a rundown of what’s going on which mostly surrounds my abrupt and, what many deem unnecessary, layoff.

I’ve been sort of thinking that with the sudden wave of work they’ve gotten, along with at least four quitting/finding other jobs since my untimely departure, that I would be getting a phone call and a request to come back and help pick up the slack.

Well, as the title of this post implies, it’s not going to happen.

My source recently told me that the company is no longer going to use temps, which means that some of them could very soon be getting their walking papers. If that’s the case then there would be almost no proofreaders left (but they are training others to proofread for the time being). Additionally, this person is also under the impression that one entire department will be phased out. And if that happens then there’d be almost no need for anyone else to be there. For the record, temps make up about 70% of the office crew and the temp agency they use is located on one of the campuses. That could be…awkward.

I’ve seen moves like this happen before and let me tell you, they don’t lead to good things. The outcome is always worse than you can imagine and the emotional carnage is unreal. With all of this happening, it seems that the work done at my former office could be slated for outsourcing.

That’s a far stretch from a few months after New Boss came to town and promised all of us that many of the temps would be taken in as permanent employees of Big Company. Everything was going well and there was all kinds of stuff coming around the corner. We’d be fine for a long time.

The work is most definitely there, but only two have been transitioned to permanent employees and that happened when I was still there. So much for that.

Then as we attended more meetings, the topic of the budget came up. This should have been an indication that things weren’t going to get any better. And during the last meeting, I heard that the information New Boss gave sounded more like smoke and mirrors. It was all so vague that nobody could think of anything to ask afterward since it answered nothing.

Do the math: budget cuts, no more temps, an entire department possibly being phased out.

At this point it seems that the days at Big Company are pretty much numbered for everybody. All I can say is good luck to all of them.