Salamander
Fire Walking

It’s an interesting perspective, watching emotional collapse from the inside out. Even knowing what’s happening doesn’t affect what is apparently the inevitable decay of trust and self-control and ability to critically analyze a situation. There are days I feel frozen, my arms and legs literally too heavy to move. That same thick gravity freezes my brain, and the chemicals between synapses swim through molasses, advancing through the synaptic clefts at a painfully slow rate.

A middle-manger slightly above me in the department has disappeared under mysterious circumstance. He didn’t show up at work, then he was reported to be on funeral leave, then it was announced that he had been terminated for “procedural violations”. They timing roughly fits when we got our reviews. I cannot help but have my own thoughts on this. His work was divided up and temporarily dispersed among the rest of us, myself included. That made no sense to me – why would they give more responsibility to someone who was herself in a “planned exit” category? I figured it wasn’t like they had any choice; the stuff had to get done and there wasn’t anywhere else to dump shiton. The reassignments were supposed to be temporary until he was replaced. I was given one new employee to supervise, and a new department I was responsible for oversight on.

They are in the process of rewriting my job description. Apparently now anyone with a B.S. in biology can do my job. The job description includes the new department I have oversight over, plus the additional supervisory role. (THAT should have been my first clue, but I missed it at the time.) When I asked if the increased responsibility came with a pay raise, my boss rewrote the job description in front of me so that the number of employees under my supervision wasn’t specified. When I told her that was one way to get around a pay increase she laughed. Apparently she thought I was joking.

Yesterday I was taken aside in the department head’s office and told that the new division of labor was permanent; we would not be hiring to replace Mr. “Procedural Violation”. I closed the door and to her office and told her that the situation made no sense to me. Our orientation meeting coving the new review procedures had made it very clear that anyone it my category was pretty much on notice. While they might try salvage training in a very few rare cases, the majority of us would be on “Planned Exit” status. Why would they give me new permanent responsibilities if I was out the door in 60 days?

Big Boss looked surprised. She said it wasn’t her understanding that this was how the review process was to be handled. I told her that the manual they handed out to us in the meeting was very clear on the matter, and that people in my session had specifically questioned this point because the diagrams explaining this in the presentation were a bit confusing. She said she’d talk to HR about it.

Meanwhile, the help wanted sign on the door of my pharmacy looking for a pharmacy assistant, will train, is looking tempting.