He didn’t try to talk to me about the scope of my responsibilities until that Thursday and was appalled at the totality of work. The next day, he came back in and said that the CEO had decided to give me one more week of employment so that they could learn my job. I nicely told him that since he hadn’t let me know of the need, I had made plans the following week to go out of town (true.) He visibly blanched.

Found out later that HIS job was to be downsized, so he angled to get mine to stay employed. He’s now an AR Rep in a small hotel.

First, a plant was closed and all employees let go during the annual shut down maintenance week. Once employee who had taken the week to go on a white water rafting trip without benefit of any wireless communication devices. When he returned home, he had an amazing number of messages on his phone, starting with calls from the employer to come in for a meeting, more calls from the employer, calls from coworkers (including his mom who also worked in the plant) and ending with a call from HR telling him that included with his severence check would be the information about the out placement services (the final message being the one that delivered the news of his termination).

Second, at an unnamed multinational hi-tech firm which had been discussing in the media for over a year that the 10,000 poorest performing employees would be laid off, the list of terminated employees was created without any direct management input (even three layers of management up) that did not appear to have any correlation with performance. There were managers who had to spend their entire day laying off employees they did not know (for most it was their first experience with lay offs), and at the debriefing meeting at the end of the day those managers were then laid off. Ice cold.