Zen...I wish you safely through the layoffs. It sucks.

My company is going through a major reorganization right now. The CEO had said that 800 jobs will likely get cut. The original implecation was that it would be upper, upper management types. But every Thursday for the past 3 weeks, so far, they have laid off a chunk of folks. And it appears completely random. Some folks who have great reputations and who are fully billable (not on overhead). Others who are low level and aren't going to cut much cost. Today I showed three different people how to query our company directory to see who was terminated in the last week. The results include people who quit too, but it is sad that pulling that list is now part of my Monday routine.

As for my job...I think I will make it through but who the heck knows. I'm trying to take comfort in the thought that severence plus my banked time off would cover about a half a year's salary. The weekly layoffs are supposed to be done by the end of November...so another month of sitting on the bubble.

Edited to fix the word salad courtesy of autocorrect.

Their blood is used for medical testing. Vital in vaccine testing, I think. Ideally, they are only blood donors, not killed (but it does have an impact on the wild population, IIRC from whatever it was I watched.)

Timelies all!

Yay, Gary's getting home tonight rather than tomorrow. He's been away since Saturday on business. I've been wrangling destructo-toddler by myself, which is exhausting when I'm 100%, let alone with my foot in a brace.

Thanks, Suzi. You too! I hate this uncertainty.

Horseshoe crabs aren't really crabs, they're more like Jillifonts, and they're really ancient, like cockroaches, unchanged for millions of years, and they have blue blood which is used in some medical testing procedure I forgot, and so they're harvested and probed and their blood is stolen and then they're released back into the sea with a fantastic story of alien abduction, but they're being overharvested because they can only take so much of that Close Encounters shit, so farming them is a good idea and also probably profitable. And that's all I know about horseshoe crabs. Over to you, billytea.

I have voted! Now I'm on my way to a salon for a Madam President mani-pedi and a glass of champagne.

Man, that sounds like an excellent birthday.

Knock on wood, but four years from now, there will be kids in high school for whom a white male president is just in History.

Horseshoe crabs are pretty cool! I had no idea.

I'm sorry about the layoffs, Zen and Suzi. That's no fun to get through.

brenda's birthday does indeed sound awesome, as befits brenda!

In my news, almost-13-year-olds girls = oh lord, give me strength.

Today my coping mechanism has been a delux pedicure then I'm headed to Torrid to find some long yoga pants and a witchy t-shirt.

Sheryl, I'm glad Gary is coming home early. Destructo toddlers are exhausting. How old is the little guy now?

Define complaints about quality.

The complaints I saw were about lack of coordination between different care providers causing problems, and about poor quality of nursing (with the implication that lower pay is drawing less qualified nurses; I don't know how the pay scales actually stack up).

No Canadian I've ever met would get within a mile of the US system.

This I actually have seen—more than one minor pro hockey player delaying their return home to Canada so they could get medical care under their US doctors. May have been something about familiarity with the team's doctors though.

sj, he's 15 months old, and walking. We're all in trouble now .