I’m not British, the British slang just seemed less open to misreading than the American ‘they’ll can you’… anyway, distracting myself…
The meat of my rant is I am fuming. My partner found out today that half his small department is being downsized and he’ll have to apply to get one of the remaining positions on Monday, with the decision on who remains being made in 7 business days.
He’s worked there for either 8 or 9 years (I can’t remember), and was given basically 1 business day to prep his internal resume before he’ll have to apply for his own job, and 2 weeks to prepare to potentially be unemployed. And it’s not a 50/50 chance either – the job listings aren’t being limited to those within his department so he’s competing with anyone in the company that wants to apply for database query programming (he builds reports for the company on all kinds of metrics… I don’t pretend to understand it all).
I am just so angry. Most of that is secondary emotion to keep my anxiety from incapacitating me. I was already struggling with my 40hr job and keeping our household running, while trying to re-skill so I could potentially go freelance and have time in the future where it’d be easier to fit in caring for my aging parents… now I have to face potentially being the sole breadwinner, and losing more than half our income. Not to mention trying to help my partner through his anxiety/depression/self-esteem issues while he struggles to hold himself together and seem neurotypical through the interview process.
They don’t care that we’re human beings with lives and emotions – just cogs in their fucking machine and when some new CEO comes in and wants to ‘make his mark’, he just strips shit down to the bare bones with no margin for error so he can show how profitable he made the company to the shareholders. And this company isn’t even traded – it’s a subsidiary of a bigger corp that is publicly traded. So short sighted.
I’m pretty sure we’ll be ok – I make more than we used to earn combined when we were newly weds, and we have a big savings account that I’m now glad that we hadn’t put into investment accounts yet, and data analysts are in demand (basically 95% of my company’s job listings are for some kind of analyst or another)… I am just not looking forward to trying to keep us both marginally functional through our shitty mental health and this stress.
Fuck corporate greed. If you want employee loyalty and engagement I’ll give you one big tip: don’t do this kind of shit! They (we also have auto and home insurance through the company he works for) also changed our home insurance underwriter without getting our ok because they quit doing business with Nationwide’s subsidiaries.