4/7/2010 Should have stayed in bed

I was still home, but at work everyone was anticipating today. It was layoff Wednesday at the City. I was in contact with work and got the notice that the 4 anticipated layoff notices would be given on this day, this on top of the two recent retiring of employees, and since we had been using some building inspectors to help us get all of our work done, it was another 3 net position reductions from just the days before. This was expected by nearly everyone and was very hard to take.

I went to work the next day 4/8 as scheduled. My direct supervisor Randy DeVaul, P.E., Deputy Director of PW came to see me first thing that morning. I had sent him an email requesting a short meeting to tell him what I knew about my situation (which turns out was nothing), but his meeting was for a completely different need. It seems that on Wednesday afternoon it was decided that the Survey Division was going to have to lose two more employees to this layoff list. The final two positions took our Division down to 8 positions from a total of 20 that we had just two short years ago - it was a very depressing environment all of that day, and into the next week as everyone was deciding whether to take an immediate buyout, or try their luck with possibly bumping to other positions within the City. We are a union environment, so the possibility of bumping does exist for some of them, and I hope they can find places, unfortunately those places will have to come from other people that need their jobs too. I will miss any of our staff that will be leaving, it's very unfortunate, but the City has absolutely no choice but to make some pretty drastic cuts all around. The only bad thing is many times there are political decisions made to answer technical questions.