On with my life

After waiting a week, I got my test results: Benign (not cancer). It strikes me as funny that they have to include the parenthetical addition, and this is in the written lab results and when the nurse told me the results over the phone. But, I guess its good to be clear. Now, on to worrying about other things, such as paying for the tests...I love that having insurance still means that I have to pay at least $1000. Those are the bills I've gotten so far - according to the email my insurance company sent me, there's another $500 bill coming. We don't need health care reform now, do we?

I just can't believe that I'm paying more out of pocket than my dad did when he had triple bypass surgery with a 7-day hospital stay.

Once I recovered from the procedure, I finished the yoga challenge. Didn't end up practicing yoga everyday, but with everything that was going on in October, I feel I did pretty well. Om Yoga does this challenge twice a year, so there is always March.

After things being relatively stable at work, the situation started to become uneasy again at the beginning of October. Back in July, the partners had called an office meeting to tell us that starting July 15th, we'd all be taking a 20% paycut for three months. The supposed end of this paycut was quickly approaching and we did not have any new projects to allow us all to go back to full time. Would be continue the pay and time cut? Would some people go back to full time and other people recieve their pink slip? No one knew, and no one was talking. Finally on the 13th, one of the partners walked around and told everyone that the paycut would continue. At least people weren't going to be laid off, I thought. Well, that was optimistic.

In the last couple of weeks, the office is feeling like a bad reality TV show. People are being eliminated one at a time, and the layoffs are happening in the middle of the pay period. Out of the four people laid off in the last three weeks, three of them were the newest hires (although one of them had been there two years). There seemed to be a reason to the madness, and then this week someone who didn't seem to be in that line of fire, and who had an active project, was laid off. That was unsettling. At this point, it seems like any of us could be next.

We finally had an office meeting today to discuss the current situation. The partners told us that although we've been able to get a couple of small projects, they're not the size that we need to sustain the office, and there will be more layoffs if something big doesn't come in.

Although I am anxious about the situation, I feel there are people that will go before me, and I'll survive as long as the firm survives. Hopefully, things will turn around before then.