The Day It All Changed...Sort Of

Today was not a regular day. For those of you that read regularly you will notice that my post is way late. 

Yesterday afternoon we got an email from the president of the company telling us that there would be a mandatory meeting the next morning for everyone. All the offices would close (unprecedented) and we were meeting in a hotel conference room (again, unheard of). Rumours started swirling that we were all going to be laid off. But if they were going to do that they probably wouldn't put us altogether in one room. Might get to be a dangerous situation for them.

Arrived at the meeting bright eyed at 9.30 (I normally start at 8.30 but to be "fair" to everyone I get to work til 5--normally my work day ceases to torture me at 4.30). Thankfully there wasn't a lot of beating around the bush and the company's CEO cut right to the chase.

We had been sold.

All sorts of dark thoughts began chasing each other around in my head. Am I losing my job? Will I be able to find another job? Will it be just as crappy as this one? How long did John know about this (looking at his face, he wasn't surprised, turned out later he had been working on the deal)?

So here's the breakdown of what this all means for yours truly.

"Everything will be the same. But different".

Ok. First of all, who says that? Secondly, I am guaranteed a job for the next "12-18 months" depending on how this all goes down. The company that bought us doesn't have a department function like ours so after everything is said and done, new positions will have to be found for us. This presents a problem for me, because while before there were other options available (being a local company they had all their operations based here: marketing, PR and advertising among them, a good stepping stone), in this new company they are strictly...well let's say that the company I started with owned apples and oranges, and I was not completely opposed to selling apples but was currently stuck in oranges? Now I will only have oranges to work with and I'm not that fond of them.

All of that I have a year to figure out. Here are the things I'm most disappointed about:

• There were some perks associated with my job. Working in the financial sector I got a free debit account (no paying for any debit transactions) as well as staff rates on loans and exchange rates and a pretty nifty gold coloured credit card. That's all gone
• That the new company is not local so opportunities may exist but I would need to relocate in order to take advantage and I'm kind of attached to my city. 
• That the company knew that this was the step they were likely going to take and didn't say anything. That John especially was working on this for the last 6 weeks- the same 6 weeks that he was raking me over the coals, putting letters in my file (just one but still), forcing me to have weekly sitdowns where we talk about feelings and was just a general dips**t.

I'm sure that there are more things...but after a day of talking about it all I can't remember which way is up let alone all the flaws in this system. I think I wrote somethings down as we went and I will be sure to refer to my notes tomorow. For now, I remain thoroughly disillusioned with corporations. 

Especially the ones that smile while they f**k you.