Soundlessness

Sitting in the morning sun, sipping coffee, with nowhere to go and no one to meet. From an extremely busy schedule peppered with meetings to the long, slow silence of aloneness. All the little daily pleasantries of working in an office have vanished. You make your own coffee and there’s one to talk to at the water cooler.

Come to think of it, you don’t even have a water cooler. Or a copy machine, a Fax, long-distance telephone service or snacks. There is no Odwalla machine, no fresh bagels this Thursday morning. One irritation is you handled all your appointments via the company’s shared e-calendar system, the kind that allows others to see when you are free to meet and when you are booked.

Since leaving a company in this era means losing all access privileges, you’ve lost access to your own calendar! You cannot remember what is happening when or where. Was the board meeting next week or yesterday? Was that coffee with a friend tomorrow or next month?

Thus disoriented, you go about your new daily rituals: Waking up long before dawn and fretting. Sending out mass emails, letting contacts know you are newly “available.” Moving the car that you used to commute in from one side of the street to the other in order to avoid getting a parking ticket.

You’ve been “redistributed.” Remaindered, de-activated, decommissioned, rendered redundant and eliminated. You’re back to being just a man without a business card.

It’s funny how close you grow with the people you work with in offices. In the days following a layoff or a company shutdown, your first impulse is to try and continue to connect with the people who were such a vital part of your daily life for so long.

But just like after any breakup, you’ve got to realize they are gone now. They’re all gone.


It’s the first lovely day in the City since my change in status. I think I’ll go to the beach and search for some seaglass.

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