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Back in the day Convex Computer Corporation was laying off a large fraction of its staff.

The plan was to come into the warroom and just hang out. Your manager would come and get you and take you into a private conference room to discuss your package with an HR specialist. The packages were pretty decent, at least.

In gallows humor I drew some stick figures on a white board for each of my team with their unix logins below them. As people were RIFfed, I would go over and put a universal red circle and slash "no" symbol around the figures who were laid off.

My time came and I marked myself as a "no" and handed the red marker to a co-worker.

I remember being a little ticked off at my manager, but when I came back to say goodbye to everyone I noticed his figure / login name had been exed out. The last thing he did before metaphorically being shot in the head was to metaphorically strangle half his children.

"What was deluxe became debris, I never questioned loyalty. But this dead end demolishes the dream of an open highway."


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