A Helter-skelter Birthday, and more Lay-offs Aftermath

In the end my birthday was quite good. I feel pretty fragile after the last weeks; and not having experienced lay-offs in a company I've worked in before, the different impacts it's having are especially new, strange and painful.

But the messages from colleagues warmed me, also private messages in chats.

It was still a little bittersweet. There was a thread of tension throughout the day as I didn't get any birthday message from my manager. It wasn't clear if he was angry at me or not. (This morning, a message was waiting for me and I was relieved.)

And I used to look forward to seeing which birthday and work anniversary presents a colleague would send to me on behalf of the company (she chose customized ones). Because she quietly sourced ideas from teammates and in my case family members, I'd also enjoy guessing which person she'd asked. Now that colleague has been laid off.

But even teammates who were out sick or travelling sent affectionate messages, one of them had given me a bottle of limoncello on the way back from Italy.

That said, I have been so full of anxiety about not living up to what everyone expects or needs from me, that it was hard to accept the kindness.

It was a relief to log off at 4:45 p.m. T. had already arrived and Uncle Pu had just rung the doorbell ten minutes earlier. Ge. had, the day before, bought gummy bears, wine gums, After Eights and fizzy gummy strips for my birthday, and I had begun to eat them.

Then we went to a Chinese restaurant in the neighbourhood, where we met Uncle M. and had a family meal of sweet-and-sour pork, chicken with peanuts, aubergines, spicy shredded potato, and cabbage with mushroom. We had two pots of jasmine tea, and of course rice to go with the meal.

Afterward we returned home for conversation, a round of limoncello, the candy as well as mochi ice cream balls that Ge. had also bought because he knows I like them (they were also a tribute to D., in a way, as he first introduced us to them on Hawaii).

All of this made me much more cheerful and 'balanced,' I guess one can say.

The evening also took a more dystopian bent, however, as we all listened to the news of Queen Elizabeth II's death.

*

Today was quite hard, though better because of the mini-reconciliation with my manager.

I've become so uncomfortable about client-facing colleagues and the management level feeling that they don't know what I'm doing when they'd like me to do something for them, that yesterday and today I've constantly been detailing in my Slack statuses what client I'm working on, or if I'm in a meeting, etc.

Today I was supposed to receive my performance review from my manager. But after the disagreements we've had over the past week I was worried that he would feel obliged to re-write it and make it a lot less positive for accuracy's sake. It was a risk I've knowingly incurred all week, but it was really hard.

In the end we just mutually agreed to discuss the more urgent topic of reorganizing my team's workflow. What made it even more awkward, however, was that I was six minutes late to our video call; I had looked at the calendar and somehow seen a blank after the lunch hour instead of a scheduled meeting, so he had to write me a reminder about our meeting. It was, to the unprejudiced mind that did not experience the same brain misfire that I did, an incredibly shady thing for me to do.

That said, my manager seemed a bit more grieved than angry about my requesting vacation on the grounds that my limits were being ignored. As I'd half-suspected, he worried that he'd gone too far earlier this week, and seemed inclined to blame himself — when I'm not sure if I behaved totally correctly. Because he is shouldering so many tasks and burdens, I feel remorse about faulting him for maybe going further than he needs to.

In our meeting I did try to repeat my opinion that it was a natural reaction to the layoffs to overdo; it is just that colleagues like me have had the opposite reaction and have become less responsive — a matter of different styles, not one approach being intentional or correct compared to the other.

Then I attended a meeting, of the team leads of my corner of the company, that intensely dove into two topics that don't touch on my work at all. The management level above mine almost seemed to shout at each other — totally unusual. I wrote to my manager afterward telling him my impression, saying that it wasn't my business to know the details of what's going on with his peers (and that he'd seemed calmer than they did) but that I hoped things were OK, and that I apologized for potentially adding to any chaos. He said that he was taking responsibility for it and would try to improve the next meeting. But while I think he can probably exert a good influence, I also didn't think it was his fault.

*

Anyway, I'm going into a whole lot of detail here. But it does fascinate me how much harm strategic glitches and the decision to fire so many people in a large organization can do to the fabric of a company, even aside from the massive effect on the people who were fired.