Death by a thousand cuts

Anybody need a copy editor?

You're probably shaking your head right now, thinking, What exactly is a copy editor, and why would I need one? I have spellcheck!

Well, if you're one of the countless people who, as you are placing the order for your Christmas cards this year, find yourself merrily typing an apostrophe in your surname, as in "Happy Holidays from the Smith's," then you indeed need a copy editor. I'm not even going to get into the geeky grammatical explanation of why that apostrophe is Just. Plain. Wrong. You'll have to trust me on this one.

The reason I'm wondering whether anyone needs a copy editor is simple: Today is yet another Layoff Day at my newspaper. (Layoff days, in my world, are sort of like wars. Once they become a recurring event, they get uppercase, proper noun treatment.)

So here I sit, wondering whether I have dodged the ax yet again. (This would be the fourth time this year, for those of you keeping track at home.) I'm cautiously optimistic, based on the fact that the e-mail announcing this round of bloodshed was sent at 12:32 p.m. and stated that nearly all affected employees already had been informed. It is now 3:50 p.m. -- no one has called, and an e-mail exchange with my immediate supervisor (who may or may not actually know) seems to indicate that I am safe once again.

As usual, the best source of information is the blogosphere (now THERE'S a sentence I never thought I'd write!). Local media gossip blogs, which have been amazingly accurate through round after round of these layoffs, have posted a list of those who have been let go. Some of the names were expected, some are stunning, some are sad (Would YOU lay off an employee who had worked nights, weekends and holidays for you for several decades and whose wife has recently been diagnosed with cancer? Well, then, you are not cut out for management!).

So here I sit, waiting and wondering and possibly sealing my eventual fate with sentences like those at the end of the paragraph above. If you're one of my bosses, trust me when I say that I'm NOT talking about you personally. I'm talking about the whole corporate machinery that builds up people and products and services, then cannibalizes itself in a desperate attempt to undo the damage wrought by macroeconomic forces and its own bad decisions.

Then gives its top executives multimillion-dollar golden parachutes.

You and I are both victims. But at least for now (4 p.m. Central, and the phone is still silent!), my name is not on the list. I hope yours isn't, either.