The silence
The weeks of knowing
You have known since a meeting some time ago. Since then you have gone in every day, said good morning to people whose jobs you have already decided, and said nothing.
This page is about that period rather than the day itself.
Who you cannot tell
Not the team, for obvious reasons. Not the people affected, because the process is not finished and saying it early to one man is unfair to the rest.
Not your peers, in a lot of cases, because you do not yet know which of them are on the list, or because one of them told the last secret.
Often not your wife or partner either. Not because you are hiding it, but because you already know how the evenings would go if she knew, and you do not want her carrying somebody's mortgage around with her.
So it stays with you, and it is heavier than you expected something you did not personally decide to be.
The delay that calls itself diligence
The date slides. You want one more set of figures. You want to be sure. You want the quarter to close first. Some of that is genuine and some of it is not, and you usually know which is which.
The thing worth knowing is what the delay costs the other side. Almost nobody, afterwards, said they wished they had been told later. A great many said they had known something was coming for weeks and that the not knowing was worse than the news.
Waiting protects you. It rarely protects them. That is worth being honest about, whatever you then decide to do.
What is already visible
People read a room better than you think, and they have been reading yours for weeks.
- You stopped walking through that part of the office.
- You are noticeably kinder to one man than you used to be.
- You went quiet in a meeting where you would normally have committed to something.
- A recruitment freeze appeared and was explained badly.
- A door that is usually open has been closed a lot.
None of this means you have handled it badly. It means the secret is not as contained as it feels from inside your office, and that the people affected are probably already frightened, without being able to say why.
What it does to you
Sleep goes first, usually somewhere around three in the morning, and what wakes you is not the numbers. It is one specific face.
You rehearse it in the car and the rehearsal gets worse each time. You start avoiding social contact with your own team because being liked while you are doing this feels dishonest.
Some men drink through it. Some stop eating properly. Some become efficient and cold for a fortnight and cannot work out afterwards why their family found it hard.
None of that is a character flaw. It is what holding something like this without a single person to say it to does to anyone. But it is worth naming, and worth watching, because the version of you that has not slept in ten days is not the version you want doing this.
When you are on the list too
It happens more often than anybody admits. A man is asked to make the cuts and then to turn the lights off behind him.
That is not an irony and it is not a story about you. It is two weights at once, and it is not weakness to say that the second one is the heavier.
The next part
What none of this tells you is how the people on the other side will remember it. That is the one thing this site can actually speak to, from having rung hundreds of them afterwards.