The question of the day
Mark has been receiving a lot of emails lately with the subject line 'Are you still working?' from, mostly, former co-workers.
It appears that many of them are not.
(We are feeling lucky. Or at least I am. Mark is always pretty confident that he's going to land on his feet. But I am the closet pessimist, and these are hard times.)
The contact is because people are networking in an effort to secure another job - and it is an interesting process - but it makes me feel like things are really getting bad.
The news is full of stories about layoffs - how many jobs are being eliminated by which big companies. (Microsoft appears to have laid off only American workers - their operations in other countries are all intact.) I think the announcements are mainly to try to convince shareholders that they are going to get a better deal with the company paring down on costs. And from experience with this in the past I know that a fair portion of the jobs being eliminated are jobs that are 'on the books' but not currently filled. You never get that in the news reports though. It's just not sensational enough. Like the foreclosure rate never being quoted in the context of how many mortgages are out there being successfully discharged.
Honestly MY question of the day isn't 'are you still working' but rather this:
How ARE you?
posted by Cathy @ 1:35 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Thanks for asking. I'm OK, except that today my adviser decided that a consent form I've had written for my thesis since September and spent the last two days needs to be translated into Spanish. Her solution? "Go ahead and translate it, then we'll (read, you) will go hand them back out." Yeah. Thanks. I'll get right on that.
On a positive not, at least I still have half a job.
I can't even go back and edit my spelling mistakes. It's been a long day.
Sorry, Carolyn. I can't edit the comments either. Oh well.
I hope you were able to get a good translation quickly - how ridiculous! In all that time you'd think she'd have paid attention once. Hope your week gets better!
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