Long Week

7am conference call. My track record with these has been less than great. My direct manager usually fills me in on these, but this time I set an alarm. Work has been cleaning house this week. They've laid off a large number of people, to the extent that a long time employee called it "the harshest since 2002". Being a remote employee, it's easy to just miss events such as this. Immediately, I started having flashbacks to 2009 when my then employer cut everyone's pay by 20%, and started laying everyone off left and right. This was shortly before being acquired. For the moment, it appears my department wasn't touched. No one fired, pay-reduced, or anything other than business as usual. IT education is typically thought of as a "loss business", operating as a necessity of selling software and services. Ours actually has a profitability mandate. That gives us some isolation from the cuts. So, despite being on vacation I've had meetings every day, and this morning at 7am. None of them are really worth writing about since in the end, things will pretty much be the same for me. Still, it's been a very long week.