Last Monday, 10/31/2016, seemed like a normal day. For four days in a row dating back to last week I have beaten Bob into work. We had our normal discussions about our weekend activities, he had moved into a new house a month ago and I moved into my apartment a week ago. At around seven am our manager came and asked Bob to visit in his office. For some reason I sensed something was not right. Within 30 minutes our lead was summoned to his office, Bob was still absent and after a wait of 15 or 20 minutes Bob returned with our lead and started packing his things.

Bob had been laid off…. WTF??

He attended the change board meeting professionally, at the end said his good byes much to the surprise of everyone in attendance and by 11:30 he left.

I asked him if they gave any sort of reason and he said something about the company not doing financially well and it was a ‘Reduction in Force’, this is the new name for being laid off.

I am going to call bullshit on this one. Sure, they laid off others that same day, a contract worker from our group and other from other groups however we just hired two new people, one has been here three months and the other three weeks. Bob on the other hand has been here nine years next month, nine years; and they keep the new hires and let him go. I can hear the sucking sound of the knowledgebase leaving. How can you possibly justify that? I think there is more to this than everyone is saying and I find the situation quite frightening.

The next day, Tuesday 11/01/2016, we had a meeting our group thought would be to discuss the layoffs and the ramification of same. The meeting turned out to be about he ramifications only, as in who would be doing what and how much of Bob’s work each of us would get and I ended up with a very large portion. What was more apparent, I believe to most of us is Bob’s layoff did not seem to have anything to do with a ‘Reduction in Force’ as management has been saying. I say this because our manager spoke about our other contract labor leaving with the time frame given of a year or two with the additional hiring of one or two additional people described as buffer people or people to help out where needed. This in no way sounds like any kind of reduction in force.

On a good note, along with getting a very large portion of Bob’s work I was also told I would be starting a Project Management class in January. This would be after work, completely paid for by the company and I was picked for this class by our manager. The extra work and class removes a bit of the frightening aspect of this very unexpected change to our work environment.