The Perfect S/torm

On Friday we got an email from the company president stating that all the corporate execs had spent the week in Vegas (in a 5 star resort, my boss said) to discuss where they could possibly cut the budget. As a result, they decided to freeze our raises for ’09, that there is no 401K matching anymore, and they let all the contractors go effective immediately.

Then we got called into a conference room by my boss and he said that if we don’t make the 50 million dollar sale in mid March that they are depending on, there may not be any work for us and they’ll have to do deeper layoffs.

Of the 6 people in my department who were here when I started, there is only one other person left, and after that happened on Friday, he put in his notice Monday morning, which means that I am the only one left after next week. He wasn’t really searching for another job either, he just happened to put in his resume for one job and got an offer on Thursday, then turned it down. But after reading that email, he called them back up and accepted the other job. I don’t blame him. If the Titanic sinks, he said, he would rather be on a lifeboat than hanging onto the stern as it took a nosedive.

Today I had lunch with our former editor and she said that she thinks our department would not have fallen apart if the reorg last January had not happened, and conversely, if the department had managed to stay afloat, we wouldn’t mind the larger company-wide problems so much. “It’s like the perfect storm happened,” she said.

I think my job is safe, and that’s one reason that I haven’t been proactive in making a change. Also I would like to have 2 years of it on my resume and I only started in 10/07. But, it’s just an intuitive feeling, I think that I will probably be making a job change before too long since all of my former coworkers from here are trying to get me on their new places of employment. I really worked with some great people here before they all left me out in the dust!