Covid Support Thread
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Yeah, a lot of people I know are being laid off now / past few months. I hope it’s not you! Not that it’s fun to be one of the ones left, but it’s way better than job searching during a pandemic.
Our FY ends in Sept. Per the usual, we had layoffs. Luckily, marketing only had to lay off 5% of it’s staff. Other parts of the business had to lay off 10%. We’re also going through mega organizational changes because we have a new CEO. Fun times.
Yeahhh, my sister’s company has already been through two rounds of layoffs and they have another one coming. She’s been freaking out for awhile. We had to let one person go in June. I feel fairly confident I will not be laid off but I wish I didn’t because… well, ya never know. I have no idea how they ultimately choose who stays and who goes. I do suspect I already know who one person will be. We’re already a smaller company and staffing is already pretty lean, so I’m hopeful it’ll only be a few people. We’ll see! I know I’ll eventually land back on my feet if I am let go, but I graduated into the last recession and I feel like I still have some kind of, like, workplace/unemployment PTSD from that chapter of my life.
Or, unfortunately sometimes it’s people who have been seen to have an attitude or be difficult.
One of my coworkers has not learned how to use Zoom, so there are a few of us who have become go-tos to run her meetings for her. I’ve never really understood what the deal is — like, why hasn’t she learned? Why hasn’t anyone told her to? It’s not hard! — and I think it’s ridiculous that this has been the arrangement for 6+ months now. I have to wake up early on Saturday to run a meeting for her. Anyway, I’m pretty sure she’ll be gone soon.
Wait, what?!? Several times now I’ve had to learn a new on-line meeting system because our clients use different apps (Zoom, Teams, GoTo). We were presenting to a client on Tuesday and 4 hours before the presentation, they sent us the GoTo invite, when they had originally said Teams. It took like 15 minutes to figure it out. Definitely doable. We managed. GoTo sucks BTW.
Yeah. She needs to go.
That’s absurd. My 85-y/o neighbor got zoom installed and learned to use it.
In my side business we’re working with a political nonprofit. My main contact is around 70 and did not know how to put text in a word doc and attach it to an email. My mom used to work with him and she said he had TWO exec assistants and drove them both crazy.
Yes, it’s weird, and I don’t understand why her supervisor hasn’t told her to figure it out. I’ve also heard she’s never learned how to use the printers in our offices and would ask someone else to print things for her every single time when she was in (she was mostly remote pre-COVID). We work with a lot of attorneys, some of whom are very much on the older side, and they can all use Zoom with relatively few issues. I actually find it endearing how some of them marvel at Zoom/technology and get excited to show off their backgrounds and whatnot.
In my work’s recent round of lay-offs it was pretty easy to see who would go. It was all the staff who had cocked up in the past, had their roles that they stuck to rigidly and didn’t even really try when the interview phase came through because they assumed their seniority and experience would see them through. I guessed who was going to go beforehand and I got it right. Especially in these times I’m baffled that people won’t take an event like lay-offs seriously and do everything they can to keep a job, one of the staff had just had a baby and was on paternity leave for heavens sake.
We have to lay off a few in our department every year so we’ve already thinned out the people who didn’t contribute much. Now we’re down to part time workers or people who indicated they were close to retiring. It sucks.
So I work out of our small satellite office in a big city, while our HQ is in a smaller city several hours away. There are quite a few coworkers that I don’t know well or whose names I wouldn’t be able to put a face to. I have impressions of some that may or may not be correct based off of email and phone calls. So I really can’t guess who will be let go aside from the one woman who can’t use Zoom, and she’s only on my radar because I’m directly affected by her lack of Zoom skills. As much as the news caused me anxiety, I also imagine the decision-makers and news-breakers are also not thrilled by the situation.
