Friday, December 12th, 2008

This would seem like an unlikely day for there to be documentation of the goings-on of... 1/2 the team was not in the office. Yet, here it is...

Sione showed up pretty late to work. It was very disappointing and though hidden, that disappointment showed in the boss's eyes. That was not the best start to a morning.

Well, the office was VERY quiet in the area. Not everywhere, though. A couple people took to going behind the giant snowman in the front lobby and jumping out to scare people. Again. It was pretty noisy and seemed not very surprising since everyone could hear it happening, especially the guy who yelled when he jumped out from behind the snowman. It was very fun for all involved.

Well, Sione started doing up some invoicin'... BIG time! He was requested to send out one specific one, but felt a little motivation to knock down that stack of papers and went all out. Maybe 6-7! :O It was pretty freakin' amazing, though he said it was no big deal.

Once the invoicing was "done", Sione moved back to reconcilin' it up... There was only one site to reconcile and he hadn't been able to contact them ALL week! It eventually turned into massive variance. Unfortunate, but what can you do? After that, the week was closed. No emails went out to announce it and it was a rather subdued closing of a week. :-\ Perhaps the mood in the air was to blame...

A couple months ago, there was a big surprise layoff of around 900 people. It creeped up VERY quickly and people were laid off on the spot the day they were told. The team lost 1/3 of its team members, which was pretty sad and also put quite a strain on the remaining team members to accomplish all of the tasks that were usually divided up between 6, now with 4. Well, after all of that happened, people basically just learned, over the last 2 months, to work with what they had and to deal with the task at hand. While it wasn't the smoothest of transitions, things smoothed out and it became business as usual. Then, on Monday, December 8th, an email went out from the President and CEO of the company. It stated that there was going to be another significant downsizing of the company and this time, it was going to be to the tune of around 4,000 employees! On Tuesday, there was a meeting of some corporate honchos who had flown in and people expected that there might be word (and layoffs) the next day. Come Wednesday, nothing. Rumor had it that decisions were made, but nothing would occur until the following week. The decisions that were made were still kept quiet, so it left a feeling of unsurety (that's a word, right?) in the office that is difficult to work with. It's like having a boss that wants to fire you, and you know wants to fire you, always standing over you as you work for 8 hours a day, scrutinizing your every move. In other ways, it's not really like that. Worry spread throughout the office and people whispered, wondered, and bemoaned what might be their fates. Well, no one knew (well, someone knew but they weren't talking) and the time passed by a little bit uncomfortably. It left a bad vibe around, as everybody could only guess at what would happen next and when. This paragraph was meant to explain the last sentence in the previous paragraph.

Friday ended with a whimper, not a roar. A sad whimper. But what would Monday and beyond hold?