Throwing Stones

People who work in glass palaces shouldn’t…

So ... in the last two weeks our flurry of not-working has reached all-new, next-gen, hi-def heights. The entire writers team in our UK office was made redundant, half of the UK Creative Services team (of which numbers the writers make up half), and out of our whole office: 21 roles (the roles, not the people, right? Right.), making the UK CS team’s cut of 11 roles, again, nearly half. So as you might expect, even more people are now doing even less work (some are in fact now officially doing none at all) for the duration of our "consultancy" period.

In addition to that shattering news, they announced on Thursday that the company is closing our Chertsey office, yes, that stalwart symbol of conspicuous prominence: The Glass Palace (see below for photo). Which sadly means that all of the contract facilities type people (Grace and Anna from the coffee bar; Simon, Hayley, and the EATS crew) also have a now rather limited shelf life.

The mood, to be redundantly clear, is less than jovial.

I’ve been coping, just. By continuing to work on my projects (mostly Sims and mostly what we used to call "US-led"), I have been able to fall back on my usual course of survival: denial. When I’m not swamped with Sims requests, I find that sleeping and sipping liberally-poured rum drinks offer nearly the same level of oblivion. On a good day, I go to yoga and tire myself out so ridiculously that I can’t think at all, let alone dwell on anxiety-provoking topics.

Yoga aside, none of this has been particularly helpful (yet far) in casting aside the nearly one stone that has been slung about (not my neck, which would probably be even worse!) my middle over the past two years. But now that I’m going to potentially have so much time on my hands, and won’t be inhabiting a great glass structure, it may well be time to toss it.