Wednesday, March 11, 2009

It Tolls For Thee.....

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Okay, folks.... it's finally happening over at Sprint.

As you know, just before Christmas, Blaine's employer, Sprint, announced that 8,000 jobs would be cut here in Kansas City by March. Some jobs were cut last month. But the remainder were left to be accomplished this week, a few a day until Friday.

It is now Wednesday... and so far Blaine has "survived".

But the hour is at hand.

Blaine came home from work today and related that about 200 more employees were given notice that they no longer had jobs. He said that the cuts were not discriminatory--- that both managers and "foot soldiers" alike were given their walking papers, one by one, all day long. The casualties were listed to stricken bystanders in hushed and terrified whispers throughout the sprawling Sprint campus' vast, technical maze of cubicles and corridors...

"You should have seen it, Bo," Blaine told me, his tired face pinched with tension, "It was awful. All my buddies---GONE. There's already one completely empty building over there--- and they say there'll be another one by the time it's all over on Friday."

(Each evening as I pack his lunch for the next day, I wonder.....is this going to be the last work-lunch I ever pack for him? Tonight I packed him a good one--- it's leftovers from tonight's dinner, shrimps cooked in a garlic/white wine sauce from a recipe I got from my mom, rice, and my famous green bean casserole. Dammit, the least I can do is give the boy some decent fuel for all that job trauma...)

Bless his heart, Blaine said that he just tried to keep plugging sadly along in his work tasks, trying to avert his eyes from the sad carnage of the daylong procession of dedicated Sprint employees who were called into private offices to be given the notification that they were among the ones who were being let go. Among those laid off were most of Blaine's co-workers, some of whom had been his friends for 10 years or more.

Blaine believes that the Job-Cutting Man cometh for him, too....

Perhaps tomorrow.....

Perhaps Friday...

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3 comments:

Abzygirl said...

Ah, I have heard the bells as they tolled for me. I have been out of work since the middle of October. I have had no interviews, not even and just a couple of calls for further information. I will keep you all in my thoughts. Sometime life just SUCKS.

Jan
www.journeystothelake.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

My workplace just cut my hours in half, and I applied at another place and got a manager position, but then they called back saying they're cutting hours too! :(

It's a hard world out there!

Unknown said...

These are very difficult times. I do hope you manage to keep your heads up.