The Beginning of the end

It starts with a call from a colleague friend in one of our satellite offices, to say she and a couple of other staff in our department have been summoned to head office for a company announcement later today. She wants to know if I've heard anything.

Nothing yet, I tell her. We don't need to say it out loud, we are thinking the same thing. The company has been in trouble for the last few years. We haven't had a 'good' company announcement for as long as I can remember. We are Pavlov's dogs; we have learned from experience to associate these announcements with bad news.

The smiles of the bosses (when we see them) and our managers since the last big round of redundancies ten months ago have been taking on a creepily manic determination of late. The effort of pretending everything is fine is starting to tell.

An hour later everyone in head office gets an email asking them to attend the meeting. I call my friend back, they're not the only ones, I tell her, this looks like everyone. She seems slightly relieved.

The office goes quiet as the gossip spreads (a rarity in my line of work where the workplace is usually a hum of noise and industry). We hear through the grapevine that several departments have been called in for the announcement, lots of people. I know this is going to be big. I wonder if maybe the whole company has gone bust and strangely I find this exciting, maybe it would make the news?

I text my husband to let him know. We were talking just the other night about redundancies at work, the managers had been smiling with even greater ferocity recently and I was worried.

It is what we were all expecting, cutbacks and more staff to go. Only this time it's lots of people, more than I've ever known to be cut in previous rounds of redundancy. Our department is losing the most staff, but we are offered a ray of hope: they have created 'new' jobs - only fewer of them - that we can chose to reapply for. Staff in other departments will just have to wait to be told who is going.

I am surprised at the scale of the cuts needed but not shocked. Some people cry. As we walk out of the meeting everyone gets an information pack detailing the 'consultation process'. We have thirty days, which seems like a long time, and there is a date: "This will be your last day of work if you are made redundant" the pack informs us. I notice it's a Monday, which is odd. What's even stranger is the way I find myself fixating on this date for the rest of the afternoon until I go home.