Everyone's talking about it, the media won't leave consumers alone - the whole world seems to be crumbling under economic pressures. My title might not be the most original, but it's definitely fitting.
For the past two months, fear has gradually taken over more and more people. In the news, front page articles are all about budgets, stimulus plans, or shuttering businesses. In the last two months of 2008, one million North Americans lost their jobs, and the trend shows no signs of stopping.
It finally hit home last week, when my company laid off a decent percentage of employees at a remote site. Following that, the project I was working on was cancelled due to lack of funding. Today, benefits were slashed and all Canadian employees were informed that we would have to sign off on newly drafted severance packages if we wanted to continue receiving equity... obviously sucking the morale out of the entire office with implications of upcoming waves of lay offs.
This reminds me of why so many people do not choose our profession - the instability sometimes gets tough to swallow. No one ever said 2009 was going to be easy - we all saw the train coming, watching from our immovable positions on track - but I guess we all wanted to have hope. Usually, I try to seek out the positive and exude optimism, but with every passing blow, it's getting difficult.
At times like these, I wish we all lived in little bubbles, closed off from the outside world. Would that be better? Being completely unaware of the bigger picture, so that you wouldn't be so afraid to spend - to boost our struggling economy? Is there such a thing as too much information, with respect to "news"?
For the past two months, fear has gradually taken over more and more people. In the news, front page articles are all about budgets, stimulus plans, or shuttering businesses. In the last two months of 2008, one million North Americans lost their jobs, and the trend shows no signs of stopping.
It finally hit home last week, when my company laid off a decent percentage of employees at a remote site. Following that, the project I was working on was cancelled due to lack of funding. Today, benefits were slashed and all Canadian employees were informed that we would have to sign off on newly drafted severance packages if we wanted to continue receiving equity... obviously sucking the morale out of the entire office with implications of upcoming waves of lay offs.
This reminds me of why so many people do not choose our profession - the instability sometimes gets tough to swallow. No one ever said 2009 was going to be easy - we all saw the train coming, watching from our immovable positions on track - but I guess we all wanted to have hope. Usually, I try to seek out the positive and exude optimism, but with every passing blow, it's getting difficult.
At times like these, I wish we all lived in little bubbles, closed off from the outside world. Would that be better? Being completely unaware of the bigger picture, so that you wouldn't be so afraid to spend - to boost our struggling economy? Is there such a thing as too much information, with respect to "news"?
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