Dear Friend and Reader,<\/p>\n
I don’t work in an office, and that’s part of the reason I find them so fascinating. The idea of a little hive where strangers get together, hang out every day whether they like it or not, work hard and get bored and hate or love their bosses five days a week can make me feel a little lonely, sitting on my own with a coffee in the morning, trolling silently through emails and news sites as the day takes shape. I’m so grateful Genevieve figured out how video chat works.<\/p>\n
When The Office<\/em> (the American one) came out on May 24, 2005 with Steve Carell as the mostly-incompetent boss, theme one was “downsizing.” I laughed as the staff got antsy, wondering whether it would be them, who was next to get the axe. This morning, my girlfriend sent me her office’s plan to handle their financial crisis: they’re intending to cut one third of their staff by the end of February. Now it’s not so funny.<\/p>\n The options, at this point are: a) severance, based on years of employment, b) downgrading to part-time or various forms of half-time work, c) a one to four year sabbatical, unpaid, d) do nothing, and risk losing the position anyway.<\/p>\n I’m lucky enough to be in a growing field: astrology, tarot and psychic work are doing quite well<\/a> in the current economic climate (in Ireland, this term is used so often it’s referred to as an acronym — CEC). But for those of you dealing with the stress of job loss (potential or realized), or are facing a memo like my girlfriend got this morning, how are you handling it? Are you looking at this as the momentum you couldn’t reach on your own to move to Costa Rica, live in a hut and surf? Are you trying to make the right choice, but all you can think about right now are the Christmas or Chanukah presents you haven’t paid off yet?<\/p>\n Let me know what’s on your mind today, and how the CEC is affecting your worldview, and your lifeview.<\/p>\n Yours & truly,<\/p>\n Rachel Asher<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Friend and Reader, I don’t work in an office, and that’s part of the reason I find them so fascinating. The idea of a little hive where strangers get together, hang out every day whether they like it or not, work hard and get bored and hate or love their bosses five days a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[36,787,52,252,755,267,117,789,788],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7782"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7782\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}