The Thanking

It almost seems cruel, but the wheel has turned and it is once again Thanksgiving. A time to inventory our blessings, show a little gratitude, meet family we haven’t seen for a year, eat to excess and then gird our loins for battle in the morning, as dawn breaks over Black Friday.

I say cruel because a lot of us are worried about our jobs, again. This has become a regular feature of employment. We get dental and eye care and the constant question of Am I Going Have A Job Here Next Year?

In a lot of businesses you can see this kind of thing coming. I sold $X last year, but only $Y this year, and I don’t think they are going to be happy with that. Maybe you could have worked the angles a little better, been a little more clever, managed your time differently and made some difference. But it’s not a surprise—here’s the line, and this is you down here, under it.

Our situation is different. Money comes in, gets divvied-up however it does, by whoever does that sort of thing, and it turns out that we have come up short. The TV news announces we are a skillion dollars behind last years’ numbers.

Wow. That’s more than I make in a whole year. It’s more than I will make in a lifetime. Hell, I don’t know—it could be more than all of the Hiatts have ever earned.

After that dryness in the mouth goes away, someone comes up with some context. Yeah, it’s a skillion dollars, but that turns out to be less than two percent of year-ago fundage. Well, okay… that’s a lot, still. But it isn’t an insurmountable problem, right? Well, here’s where it gets interesting.

Some would say let’s take something out of reserve, give everyone a two percent haircut and wait for the Good Times to roll, again. News stories now tend to indicate the economic storm is over in many parts of the nation or in some key parts of the economy. See? Things will be better soon. We can all hold our breath for twenty-six weeks, if we know that’s as long as it will be.

But it doesn’t work like that. Instead, here, historically, the cap’n will throw someone out of the lifeboat, to make things better and easier for those who remain. We’ll motor along, Doing What We Do until the word comes down and then we will just decide that we don’t need to teach Principles of Elevator Operation any more, and that entire program is cut.

There are all manner of solutions to this. We could all take a tiny pay cut. We could all take a free day off every so often. We could use our current chairs and computers and copiers for an extra year, or two. We could cut back on travel. But for some reason it has been seen in the past as better to do it this way. Instead of everyone suffering a little, a few will suffer a lot.

From a strictly numbers point of view, I’m in good shape. So is my wife. The two of us together make a much wider target, but still, we are only two of hundreds and hundreds. So numerically the risk is probably greater walking to lunch or driving downtown. I teach people how to put information on the Internet. The Internet is more popular now than it was when you started reading this, and more information is moving from printed page to online, with a corresponding need for more people to know how to do that. It isn’t like I am teaching people how to operate an elevator.

But I have friends here, who work in shaky fields of shaky departments, doing work that probably won’t be missed the way, say, teaching Calculus or History would be. I hate the thought of missing them almost as much as the thought that the bullet hits me.

It doesn’t matter how good a job you do, this way. It isn’t about how long you’ve done it. If it is seen as a surplus line, the whole crew goes away. *Poof!* Like fish swimming in a school, with a fisherman overhead. What happened to Bob? Don’t ask, just keep swimming.

So yeah, I am thankful that I have a job. But I already wonder what next years’ Thanksgiving may be like.