Agony

Friday the axe fell again at my husband's company. Since the company is national and many work from home on occasion, including my husband that day, layoff notices were done by phone call. All day Friday, we jumped every time his office line rang, is it us? is it we? has our time come? Each time, it was a colleague trying to continue some vestige of work which was all but impossible given the circumstances.

All day we waited for his fate and in the late afternoon, an email arrived stating that more details were forthcoming from the CEO. So, we waited, again. It was bad enough that the email did not arrive until 7pm but it carried no relief just further torment. After squirming all day, he was treated to an email stating, in essence, that the status of the employees in his division would be determined "next week." Yes, they were treated to the reality of an open-ended death knell, another week of bile churning speculation.

Today he described the feeling from the bench today as one of sheer panic as other bits and pieces of information surfaced to put an even bleaker spin on the whole macabre situation. As we all know, a definitive answer is much, much better than not knowing one's fate. Right now, no one knows what to do or how to act. The one thing they do know is that their group, as they know it, will not be intact come Friday.

Who will be the ones to go? The logic supports any number of outcomes, all of which are plausible. Whatever the outcome, we know we will survive. No one is immune during this economic downturn but it is totally agonizing when the process is dragged out one painful nail at a time.