COVER -> RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT
THE QUIET STORM - I received e-mails from two friends this week -- one with whom I communicate regularly, the other whom I hadn't heard from in months -- informing me that they had become casualties of the dot-com downsizing which continues unabated. Because many of my Day Job assignments have to do with reporting on the business side of technology, I spend a lot of time writing about people being laid-off from various companies, from CNN to Dell Computers, these days. It seems that there's a quiet storm going on these days as the United States economy cools down, leaving lots of shattered careers in its wake.
In the case of my first friend, he worked for a company at which I had been employed only scant months ago. I warned him that they were on a slippery slope then and that keeping his eyes open for other opportunities might be advisable. The day before he got the e-mail telling him he'd receive his final paycheck "as soon as is reasonably possible under our system," I had written an article for my new employer about how his troubled company was the target of shareholder class action suits, a trading investigation and had failed to meet Wall Street analysts' expectations of earnings per share. That company announced that it would layoff 25% of its staff on the same day it reported its dismal quarterly results.The second friend's company is being more sneaky. They haven't made a layoff announcement. They are quietly sacking eight or ten people a week at rotating locations, rather than doing the type of across-board cuts that usually get noticed and reported by industry media types like myself. Sorry, fellas, the cat is now out of the bag.
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Not to mention that I myself was laid off from a dot-com less than six months ago. That ramps the stat up to 15% of the people in my personal universe being affected.
As the soft snow falls here in Baltimore this afternoon, silencing the street outside my apartment, I sit thinking about how this quiet storm of near-recession is affecting my life both directly and by osmosis. I have two friends now who are going to be deferring purchases they might have planned like a lot of other people. One of them is having his annual family reunion this weekend with this new cloud hanging over the event.
In our new global economy, down-sizing, riffing, restructuring, has been part of the landscape for nearly twenty years now, Old Hands will tell you. But familiarity has done nothing to ameliorate its chilling effect. You can't help but worry yourself, about your personal future, about taking what your boss tells you at face value, in this kind of climate.
After all, managers are people who are trained to come from a meeting where they hear about staff being cut and then tell you that you have nothing to worry about so they can squeeze you for that last ounce of productivity before showing you the door...
I understand this latter fact, but that does not mean I like it. I consider it the grossest form of manipulation and callousness. And I think about the toll it must take on a person's humanity to have to adjust to that kind of selfishness. I worry for their souls.
As said by other editorialists here, the soul is not a big concern in our modern era. Nor is the plight of those with less advantage than ourselves for most of the advantaged. That is to their detriment, I believe.
And I believe that it is no coincidence that we have moved from the administration of corporate favoritism, here in diminishing America, to the administration of corporate worship just as the average people are being asked to sacrafice, again, in the interests of enriching the mighty in the board rooms here and abroad.
QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? Go ahead and email Rod.
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WEB SITE PICK OF THE DAY: Here's some more rapier-sharp humor brought to us by Michael Moore of "The Awful Truth." Enjoy!
