That's what they say. Unfortunately, sometime in the next few weeks, I may not have a choice.

Since Monday, I've had a meeting with my boss and his boss on my calendar for today; when it appeared there and I asked about it, my boss said oh, we'll be talking about the new team setup for the work on the Second Edition of $PRODUCT (which is coming up this summer).

Fair enough, I thought; they're reorganizing the processes all the time, and a new edition of a major product would be the prime time to go to that well again. I don't much like it when they rearrange all the deck chairs, but this too shall pass.

Today, I arrived for the meeting to find that, in addition to my boss and his boss, they'd invited one of the guys from HR. Hmm.

At which point my boss's boss, reading from a prepared statement like some kind of enscandaled congressman, informed me without a pause that:

1) The new process for the Second Edition will be, in essence, to outsource it to (literally) India.

2) That being the case, they won't need anyone who does the things I do.

3) As of June 24 if not earlier, my position will be replaced by a new one, in the same slot on the org chart, the inhabitant of which will be a Project Coordinator interfacing with the team of Indians who will have r eplaced me.

4) I'm free to apply for that position—via the job posting on the company website, like any rando off the street. There's no internal hiring process nor any advantage to already being an employee.

4a) I can also apply for any other opening in the company I feel I'm qualified for, with the same caveat.

5) If I don't, or I don't get it, I'll be done on June 24—unless they hire someone for the new position before then, in which case I'm gone instantly.

6) At that point, I'll get three weeks' severance pay, if I'm deemed to have remained Positive and Professional about the whole business during my dead-man-walking period. If I'm not, I get nothing.

6a) Presumably, if any of them have so much free time they google me to see what I might be saying outside of work, and they find their way in here, they won't consider this positive or professional, but, well, fuck it.

And... that was it. No consideration for four years of service, three of them spent doing whatever bizarre, not-what-I-was-hired-for nonsense they asked of me; no explanation why this time the whole position's been revamped under me is so different from the previous ones that I'm not fit to stay in it; not the slightest whiff of awareness of how ridiculous it is for a non-profit to be outsourcing shit to India in the first place.

Y'know, when I was a kid, I didn't get why unions were still a thing. They seemed no longer necessary—a good idea whose time had passed. I didn't realize then that I'd been born toward the end of a period of stability and progress that was anomalous in human history, so I grew up thinking it was normal.

It wasn't, and now that it's ending I'm finding it very difficult to get to grips with the return to what has been, superior tech level notwithstanding, much more customarily the human condition throughout history: oligarchy, sectionalism, superstition, intolerance, cruelty without consequence, an all-hands race to the bottom and devil take the hindmost.

Or possibly I'm just pissed off, and up too late, and frustrated that I can't do the Culturally Idiomatic Thing at a time like this and get hog-bladdering drunk.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.