Friday Night Live

On towards eight last evening, my former editorial assistant, call her Cathy (not her real name), swung by the magazine. I was still there, swamped with work, trying to get two stories out my computer and into final pages, so she just sat in my office, hiding out while she waited for her friend, who is the only assistant editor left on staff. All the other editorial assistants and assistant editors have now been laid off; they were let go, I suspect, to balance the picking off of older workers nearing retirement age (that's a pretty incendiary statement, I know it). We have interns and temps to do the assisting now, but mostly we do our own admin work, chasing down invoices when they get lost in accounting for the umpteenth time, and crafting careful emails to incensed writers whose work has long been completed and whose rent or phone or credit card bills are coming due.

Cathy was let go in the last round of layoffs a year ago. She had been on staff two short years, and she truly was the best. Great work ethic, a quick study, good-hearted, full of initiative, organized, wry and witty. It was easy and enjoyable working with her. Yesterday, as she sat across from me, both of us not talking much as I tapped on my computer keyboard, but the two of us exchanging comfortable chatter in intermittent bursts, I had the strange sense that she was family, like a niece or a cousin, a young person I would go out of my way to help in whatever way she might need. She's doing well, actually. She found a good job with a publishing house just a couple of months after being laid off, and they seem to appreciate her there.

It was good to see her. It was good to remember that there is life after being laid off. Just in case I'm one of the next ones to be picked off.

And now, on top of everything...

Guilt.

Today is parent visiting day at my daughter's school, which means parents are invited to stand in the backs of classrooms and see where their tuition dollars are going. Our daughter asked us to come. She wanted to show me her photography porfolio (she got a solid A in photography, by the way). I wanted, so wanted, to be there, but today is also the day that two major stories are due in, and I have to edit and move them to my editor in chief by the end of the day. One is likely the be in good shape, the other is from a writer I have never worked with before, so I have no idea what to expect in terms of the work needed to get it to a place where I can send it to the editor in chief for her sign off. She is very invested in both stories, and both are potential legal nightmares, so both require careful and hyper attentive handling.

Today is also the last day in the office for the people who got laid off, and I and a couple of the other editors are supposed to be taking the woman I worked so closely with for 11 years to lunch. A goodbye lunch. I could miss it, I guess, but it would look callous and fickle. I want this woman to know how much I have appreciated her as a colleague and as a friend. Today, with her spirit still reeling from the "why me?" questions, I really need to be there to show her this.

I can't find the words to convey this to my daughter. The sentences that come to mind just sound as if I'm putting everything else ahead of her. I know this is what it means to be an adult, that one is always faced with these hard choices. But I wish I could be standing in the back of her classrooms today, watching the light dancing in her face because she is happy that her mama is there.

I wish I could be as pragmatic as my husband. When our daughter stood in the dark at the foot of our bed at 6 a.m. and asked her sleeping parents in a plaintive, guilt-inducing voice, "Are neither of you coming to my school today?" he had no problem saying no. Even though she looked crestfallen, he didn't follow her around as she got dressed trying to make sure she understood the reasons why neither of us would be there. When I asked him, "Don't you wish you could go?" he answered, "Of course not. This is high school. Who wants their parents hanging around?"

And yet, my girl wants us.

Guilt. It feels like self-recrimination and sadness. Useless and maybe misguided. But there.

Scorched Earth 2

So last week Wednesday, 18 people at my job were given "The Talk" and an innocuous envelope that held their severance package. As it turns out, I am not among them. But I am devastated by some of the people who were, including the woman I work most closely with, my "work spouse" of sorts. I don't really understand them letting her go. She brings talents to the table that no one else has, a head for coverlines, a way of packaging stories, and an editing style that often irritates writers for its pickiness, but that inevitably makes you think of dimensions you'd overlooked, questions you'd neglected to nail down, and always makes the piece stronger.

I counted on her as a human being, too, her calm equanimity, her quick but never cruel wit, her refusal to give in to the free-floating fear and paranoia that is a constant in my workplace. I am still in shock and denial that she's leaving. We shared the same job title and backed each other up seamlessly. Which makes me also ponder the fact that they must have put us side by side and said, Okay, which one? I wonder if they chose her because I waived my medical insurance coverage with the company, going with my husband's instead. I wonder if it came down to the fact that I cost the company less.

I feel like we're all on a conveyor belt, except none of us knows how close we are at any given point to toppling off the end of it. We can't see what's ahead, we only know that conveyor belt just keeps on rolling, and we could get to the end at any time. There are so few of us left now, and so much work to get done. I'm not afraid of working hard and I love the nature of the work I do. But the losses we've sustained could break your heart.

Here we are again

The word is that there will be layoffs at my job this week. Which means everyone is walking about with breath sucked in, uneasy questions in the silences between their words. Am I valued here? If I am let go, how will I make do? What about the people who depend on me?

A year ago, when we were last at this pass, my son used to tell me goodbye in the mornings with a line from the reality TV show Survivor (our family has watched since season one). He'd say, "Don't get voted off today, Mom." We'd laugh about it, and somehow it would make me less anxious.

Sick Child

My daughter has been throwing up since before daylight, and now she's weak and shivery and a crumpled puppy, rolled up under the covers, fitfully asleep. I refuse to leave her like this. I want to be home to ply her with tea and crackers and soup, to rehydrate her little body. But oh, the angst of missing work in these times. Just staying home and taking care of my girl feels like a fireable offense. My performance review is tomorrow, too. Okay, take a deep breath, because this is how it is. There is nothing more important in this moment that being here with my sick child.

Seeking Clarity

Said to me by my executive editor this morning: "No one under the age of 52 should be thinking about retiring from this company, because that's just not the way things work anymore..."

It was a single sentence in a string of sentences that added up to paragraphs, but this passing observation stood out for me as if it had blinking lights and clanging bells around it. Yes, I am under 52. There are so many ways to parse this...

Scorched Earth

They're firing people at my husband's job today. Men and women with 20 years of service are getting the thank-you-and-don't-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out speech. It's mostly the carpenters and lampers and maintenance and mailroom guys and some of the exhibition workers. The science people, which includes my husband, seem to have survived this round. But now they all get to find out what the world is like for the survivors, the ones who now have to plant flowers in the sorched earth, and act like the holocaust didn't even happen.

Contingencies

I've been trying so hard not to write about my job, to keep this blog to the subject of family, especially about the juggling act that the generation in between the mushrooming kids and waning elders must manage every day. But work is part of that, especially in this new corporate reality, where so many have been laid off. 

These days, the workplace feels like a ghost town with rows upon rows of empty white cubicles, the air unnaturally still. The younger ones who kept the place humming with their exuberance and fashion statements and not-yet-crushed ambition and romantic hopefulness, are gone. The older ones who could always calm you with a wry word or a dose of seasoned pragmatism, are gone. The ones in the middle, the ones who are your age, people you came up through the ranks with, whom you consider friends, many of them are also gone. It feels like the slow dimming of a vibrant and still-worthy enterprise, choked off by budget contingencies. 

Let me state that I'm happy to have my job. Actually, the work itself, the messing about with words, the gritty elegance of the stories, all of that I love. I have very little ego these days, yet I am obsessive by nature and my work ethic is as compulsive as it has always been. Still, it is disconcerting to walk the floor and see the dark offices and empty cubicles where so much energy used to reside. It's like the slow leak of air from the invisible pinprick in a once festive, now faded balloon.

I am home sick today, trying to fight off the flu. I am almost thankful for my sore throat, aching limbs, cotton-wool head, chills from fever. It is a guilty pleasure to climb back under my covers, a legitimate excuse to not see, for today at least, the dwindling spirit, the imperceptible spiraling down of our great dreams and imaginings. Today, I will take a break from the question that shadows everything: What now? Cold outside. Warm in here. Delicious sleep, baby.