6,000 Employees in Search of a Job

Oh the theatre buffs will appreciate this entry title. The rest of you will just assume I’m out of my tree yet again.

I have a mere two weeks before I will be begging for employment from the company I’ve spent the last sixteen years with. When I hired on as a cashier at one of our retail locations back in the day, I never in a million years thought I would stick around for this long. If you’d told me then that I’d be making almost six figures doing accounting and financial management for the company, I would have laughed my ass off and told you to suckit. Yet here I am…a skirt-and-blouse-wearing corprate shmuck with a nice office and a Monday thru Friday schedule. I commute and attend conference calls and tsk at management demands while stealing Post-It pads and boxes of Bigelow Earl Grey tea from the break room. I am part of a strange and wonderful amalagam of The Office and Office Space and occasionally Clockwatchers. My work life could be a trite, cheeky indie flick with Parker Posey as my sidekick.

I haven’t mentioned the downsizing much because honestly I’ve been trying to forget it’s happening. I’ve had incredible pressure on me this year with school coming to a close, the festival being a large and momentous affair this time ’round, and several smaller projects I’ve taken on, not to mention that having a boyfriend on top of it all just sucks what available time and energy I have. Irritatingly enough, the news enjoys reporting on the layoffs every once in a while. Especially in my area because I work at corporate headquarters and our company is a large presence in the region, both spacially and financially. So everyone I know who also knows where I work has been contacting me and asking me questions about my job. After a while it gets tiresome answering their questions. Not because I don’t want to talk about it or because I think they’re stupid for asking. Repeating these same details over and over again has made me realize how REAL this is now. In two weeks, it will become even more real. I don’t know that I’m ready for this.

One thing that many people outside the company assume is that seniority will play a large factor in the company’s decision of who stays and who goes. Oddly enough (but entirely understandable), our company hasn’t done layoffs based on seniority since the 1970’s. We typically do layoffs based on performance and relevance. If you do poorly on your annual reviews, you are further ahead in line for the chopping block. Don’t keep yourself trained or aware of the latest tools and information available to you and you risk the axe due to obsolescence. I’ve managed to survive past layoffs due to my extremely high performance reviews and my ability to self-train and learn new tasks quickly with minimal interruption to workflow. But will this be enough this time around? Because with these layoffs, we’re doing something entirely new. We’re interviewing for jobs.

I haven’t had to interview and sell myself for a job in over eight years. I especially haven’t had to compete with hundreds of equally-qualified coworkers and acquaintances for these open positions. Suddenly we’re all sitting around, trying to strategize and figure out how willing we are to sell the people around us up the river to save our own necks. The company has turned us into spies and backstabbers and it’s the worst feeling in the world. I refuse to step on people just to get ahead, but now I worry about who is out there preparing to step on me during their own scramble for employment. I don’t like second-guessing coworker motives. I don’t like second-guessing my own.

I’m torn between fighting for my job and asking to be left on the layoffs list. Partly because I am single and can survive better than my married coworkers with families. And partly because I’m already exhausted. My head is a mental wasteland and I don’t know how much fight I have left in me. How badly do I want to go through the agony and humiliation of begging for a job like I’m already unemployed? How badly do I want to stand on the backs of others who need this more than me? I don’t even know that I have the energy to answer these questions. I just know that in two weeks, I will be swallowing my pride and making a choice. But which one?