The Layoffs (Insert Ominous Music)

It’s been all over the news: Boston Scientific to lay off 13% of workforce. We saw it coming. Anyone who’s been paying attention knows the company has been struggling. Today they will announce the first round of firings (or “head-count reductions” in corporatese). The tension is palpable, the anticipation unbearable. The unknown has left employees variably unmotivated, frantic, melancholy and downright short-tempered.

I was in a meeting yesterday and noticed on the white board that someone had drawn a flow chart of emotions one might feel after being laid off. It started with denial, then moved to drugs/drinking, anger, suicide, avoidance, and finally on to new opportunities.

I found myself ruminating on the original intent of the drawing. Was it a jesting employee (uncertain of his/her own future) attempting to lighten the mood? Was it drawn for a meeting of HR personnel; a serious tool to help deal with potentially desperate victims of corporate cruelty? In the upper left corner of the drawing someone had written SAVE. The artist must have put time and thought into this creation, and didn’t want it nonchalantly wiped into oblivion.

I wonder where I would land on the chart. Probably a combination of drugs/drinking and avoidance. How come indifference isn’t one of the choices? It’s no secret that I don’t like my job. That I fear being driven slowly insane by mundane repetition and carpeted walls. That I look at people who have spent 30 years in a cubicle and feel both pity and contempt.

Truthfully, I feel guilty for my response to the ordeal. While I’ve adopted a flippant, dismissive attitude, those around me scurry, panicking that they won’t be able to pay their mortgage or feed their kids. I’m young. I can bounce from job to job, learn new tricks. And we all know that technical writing for a medical device company is a major deviation from my life goals.

But these people have obligations, responsibilities. They have made their time here more than a job, more even than a career. This place, for many, is life. Boston Scientific is at the center of plans, hopes, aspirations. It’s their social circle, their family, their church. And now Boston Scientific will callously toss them aside as they are forced to face the cold reality: Boston Scientific is a business. It doesn’t even know their names. Nor does it care to. The whole thing honestly makes me sad.

As I walked to my cube this morning the air was noticeably still. The calm before the storm. None of cheerful chirping from the ladies in marketing. No aisle meetings of middle-aged engineers talking about last night’s football game.

No one is safe. Managers are as uncertain about their jobs as those that report to them. No one knows how they will be informed that their time at Boston Scientific has come to an end. Will it be a phone call? A menacing summons to a clandestine conference room? A pink slip sent through inner-office mail? Maybe it would be best to ignore the phone, to set up the out-of-office assistant on Outlook, to spend as much time as possible away from the cube (they can’t fire what they can’t find).

Or maybe I’ll make a preemptive strike. I’ll storm into my manager’s office, clear the pictures and potted plants from her desk with one merciless swipe of my forearm, and proudly pronounce: “You can’t fire me. I quit!”

But really, I imagine that getting fired would be just the kick in the backside that I need.

I’ll keep you posted on how it all goes down.

Thanks for reading.