I Vent to Heal

So... I know that I blog to get stuff out of my system and I find it awesome almost, that I almost never blog about work. In retrospect, it's because I was a small fish in a large pond. I did what I was supposed to, I chugged along, but now things have changed.

Why now? In 2009 we did a lay-off, people in my department who had been with the organization 14-15 years were offered a retrenchment package. Several of them weren't really given a choice, and most of them were horrified. They weren't sure what they were going to do, the company had become their world, almost home if you will. Familiar faces, places, structures... gone. Some time later, we did a restructuring. Moved people around, created positions, put people in them, etc. Again, I was a minnow, quite unaffected by the restructuring, not seeing what it meant.

Now, I'm a slightly bigger fish, with thoughts about my future in this organization, and we've just done another round of lay-offs and a restructure. People who came to see the organization as their home, gone. People I met and enjoyed meeting, gone. And the moves that have been made, were made without interviews or even announcements. They were hand-picked for their positions.

I'm horrified, and not sure what this means for me. Do they expect that I will wait to be hand-picked? Do I call them out and ask for an explanation? Do I stay quiet and start looking at my options? Is this what they intended? To make people nervous, unsure?