The place I work has been losing money, a lot of money. We were fine until the management in their collective wisdom decided to operate a two shift system about 18 months ago. The problem was there were too many orders for one shift and too little for two shifts. They decided to go for a two shift system and promptly started losing money, lots of money - I think at one point it was over £100000 a week. The main management type who made the decision to go on the two shift system left and took early retirement shortly after…

...since then we had a troubleshooter type manager come in and then a ‘real’ management type. After fullfilling orders and the like, we went back onto the one shift system at the beginning of this year. Since then the amount of losses we’re making have lessened but we’re still making a loss. With rumours flying around, there was a big meeting last week. After work we were all called into a meeting to be given the news.

I hate these things because instead of just coming out with “we’re doing x and y”, they have to save face, give rubbish about market conditions and generally take way too much time announcing the actual announcement. I have to admit, part of the reason for me not liking it on this particular day is that I’d be missing the start of Monk. So the announcement went ahead, blah blah, market conditions (told you), we’re closing one of the departments, there will be redundancies, meetings with all staff over next few weeks, blah blah. The department being shut isn’t one I’m part of so it won’t actually affect me (yet, there will no doubt come a time soon though...). After the announcement we had to wait longer until we were given letters which had the exact same details as the announcement - which again doesn’t affect me directly. Just stop with the bloody announcements and give me the letter the following day, in work time, not Monk time!

So, in summary, I still have a job for the moment.