Countdown: Three and a Half Days

My company wants its stock price to go up, so last Wednesday it started firing large numbers of its employees across the country and across the globe. My boss spent the last few days packing up his office; the UPS guy carted off the cartons today. I went yesterday to bid farewell to his boss, who was the director of our department, who had built the department virtually from the ground up, and who was willing to risk that, despite my higher degree in the literature of a small Balkan country, I was fit for employment.

Everywhere we look, the holes in our network of colleagues, the keys to getting work done in a global corporation, are growing. We're all remapping our ways of doing things but otherwise keeping our heads down. It'll be good, this weekend, to kneel down on the floor and greet a little warm creature that doesn't know much about anything.