Flashback

Had a disquieting moment at my workplace last week. Picture this:

It's early Friday afternoon. Earlier, there has been a fair amount of upper management discussion behind closed doors (though that in itself isn't unusual). Now, the company president goes around and gathers the members of the project team into one of the offices for a quick meeting. A couple of people make lame jokes of the "Uh-oh, are we in trouble?" and "What'd we do now?" genre. I don't laugh. My former colleagues from The Company will understand why, I'm sure.

Turns out one of the remote employee/contractors is being let go. My stomach does a somersault. But thankfully (at least from my perspective, though perhaps not from his), it's not a portent of cutbacks; apparently there was some kind of issue with this individual (we didn't get any details). The project team is being told before the weekly company-wide newsletter circulates the terse and damning "We wish him the best of luck in his future endeavours" message. A couple of the developers who had worked with him want to email the guy to say goodbye, but for security reasons, his email account is going to be shut down immediately, and no one has an alternate email contact for him.

I go back to my office and breathe a huge sigh of relief.

I hate deja vu.