Friday, January 30, 2009

Under the weather

You know that bug that’s going around… ya, I got it. Stupid bug.

My ear feels like someone’s repeatedly stabbing it with a screwdriver, my head’s about the explode, I’m sneezing every 10 seconds and my nose is dripping like a faucet – I actually feel really bad for the trash guy having to empty my infested snot-filled tissue piles at the end of the day, my throat hurts every time I take a sip of my Chai tea latte, and I am cranky as hell because of all the above.

I do not want to be at work. I want to crawl up in bed and sleep the misery away.

But I guess I can’t complain too much. Thank God I still have work to go to.

A few of my colleagues finally spoke up in the last staff meeting about concerns with the recession and how it’s going to affect our company. Now I work for a construction and engineering management firm, and a good percentage of our business comes from infrastructure projects with the cities and the state. They tell you that we’re probably in one of the select industries that can be considered “recession-proof” (whatever that means) – especially with all the infrastructure projects President Obama is promising. Then we hear about one of our bridge projects getting frozen because of lack of funding…

OK, so I don’t build the damn bridge. But I work with the marketing department that gets them the contract to work on the bridge. So I like to convince myself that I’m somewhat indispensible and I really shouldn’t be worried.

But I do. Worry, that is. Who wouldn’t?

You hear about people losing their jobs all the time. I talked to a friend from college and she just got laid off (along with 15 other people, including her sister) from a consumer electronics company after working there for 5 years. I know people who work for the state of California who just found out today that starting next month, state employees will be forced to NOT work (and lose pay) for 2 days/month to try to redirect some money for the overgrowing deficit. But I digress…

So one of the supervisors come back with a pageant-world-peace answer. “[Our company] will be fine as long as everyone continues to focus on what we are supposed to do. We will all ride out this together as a team.”

Was that supposed to be reassuring?

I suppose they wouldn’t outright tell us if the company was in any kind of trouble anyway, but I guess I was expecting something a little more specific. Well, for what it’s worth, I really do like this job amiss the late nights sometimes. And I’ll just keep dreaming of my dream job with Disney for now.

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