My company. Jesus tapdancing Christ. I ask you.

Maybe I should make that line default entry text in that little box in the prefs section and just append whatever they've done that day underneath.

You'll recall me angrily complaining hmm, let's see, just shy of three weeks ago now, about my company firing a couple more people at my level and redistributing their responsibilities among the survivors. By the way, that meant basically me, one other guy and this woman working out of her home in Florida. We used to be the largest trade newsletter publisher in the world.

So, just shy of three weeks later, God damn if they don't do it AGAIN! Today we get an e-mail saying that they're not replacing this one woman's position over in the electronic content section. I don't know if they laid her off or she left on her own. But she's not going to be replaced, so we all have to generate the company's online site now. This is basically our newsletter content, but all tweaked and repurposed for online consumption. Plus some additional features, like financial reporting, and a company profile every other month out of each of us etc. Basically, it's lets all do one more paid position's worth of work, hey? What ho? Let's to it then!

Of course they also let go some needless executive type they've been paying several editorial level salaries to for no reason other than social connections, but he's going to stay on and consult. And they promoted my bosses' boss to Senior Vice President, which I assume includes a raise, because she keeps making budget by getting rid of people and piling all their work on the fewer pieces at the bottom. In other words, the Jenga model of management.

The timing is especially gutsy here. I can only conclude that they've decided if the rest of us haven't quit by now, it's because we so desperately need the job that they could basically demand a kidney to sell on the black market and we'd have no choice but to pony it up.

That may be true of the other guy, who's in his upper 50s and has a wife with hellish medical problems, not to mention the incident with the caretaker he hired to stay with her while he worked - who turned out to be smoking crack and ultimately forged a bunch of his checks and cleaned out his bank account. And I can't speak for the woman in Florida, but after the company fired her back in the mid-90s she spent a couple years bitching about what a snakepit it was and how she'd dance on its grave one day. And yet, now she's back, talking about wanting to take on more managerial responsibility. I can only assume she's in similarly dire straits.

But it ain't true of me. I'd have pulled the trigger months ago if the idea of not having my income didn't scare the hell out of my wife. And if I didn't have an exit plan to reinforce the idea that there was an end to the tunnel if I could just hang on maybe another six months.

But I honestly don't know what she's going to tell me this time.