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 personal calendar! You cannot remember what is happening when or where. Was that board meeting for your non-profit this week or next? Was that lunch with a friend tomorrow or next month?
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 guy 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 warm day since this latest change in status. I think I’ll go to the beach and search for seaglass.
(This from 2007, just after being laid off from a job. That company soon went out of business. Similar things happened frequently during my 50-year career.)
HEADLINES:
Israel is beginning to cross the Rubicon in the Gaza Strip (The Hill)
Anti-Israel mob storms through Russian airport as flight from Tel Aviv lands (CNN)
Gaza deaths top 8,000 as tanks and infantry push in during widening ground offensive (AP)
Lebanon’s Hezbollah weighs dueling appeals: ease attacks or escalate (WP)
Gazans break into aid centres, taking flour and supplies, UN says (Reuters)
Christie says Meadows immunity deal makes Trump Jan. 6 case ‘much tougher’ (The Hill)
For Mike Johnson, Religion Is at the Forefront of Politics and Policy (NYT)
Spiders Might Be Quietly Disappearing (Atlantic)
Hurricane Otis death toll rises to 39 as searchers comb through debris in Acapulco (NPR)
For New Zealand’s Maori communities, climate change is already hurting (WP)
Mass shooting in Tampa, Florida: 2 killed, 18 others hurt when gunfire erupts during crowded Halloween street party (CBS)
Sam Altman Warns That AI Is Learning "Superhuman Persuasion" (Futurism)
AI doomsday warnings a distraction from the danger it already poses, warns expert (Guardian)
Alan Turing and the Power of Negative Thinking (Wired)
Child Entertained For 5 Minutes By Plastic Toy That Will Take 1,000 Years To Biodegrade (The Onion)
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