{"id":1689,"date":"2009-03-30T20:27:12","date_gmt":"2009-03-30T20:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1689"},"modified":"2009-03-30T20:27:12","modified_gmt":"2009-03-30T20:27:12","slug":"the_thousandyard_stare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2009\/03\/30\/the_thousandyard_stare\/","title":{"rendered":"The Thousand-Yard Stare"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There was another round of layoffs at work today, a big one. Looking for the positive aspects, it did take out a couple of people who&#8217;ve been thorns in my side, but also a few more friends, which really sucks. As <a title=\"Good Night, and Good Luck\" href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/2009\/01\/good_night_and_good_luck\/\">before<\/a>, I remain <i>reasonably<\/i> confident that my own job isn&#8217;t going anywhere any time soon. However, watching the slow parade of the unfortunate march one by one into the HR office and then back to their cubes to collect their personal effects with a blank-eyed escort hovering nearby&#8230; well, I <i>can<\/i> think of grimmer sights but I prefer not to. The worst was seeing a sweet, soft-spoken man in his fifties struggle to control his tears as he took down his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ghosts.com\/calendar09ii.html\"><i>Ghosts<\/i> calendar<\/a> and laid it carefully into the top of a packed bankers box. I didn&#8217;t speak to him, didn&#8217;t say goodbye, and I wish I had. I was oddly embarrassed, as if I personally had done something to him merely by not getting my own phone call from HR. I think I can imagine what he was thinking, though. At his age &#8212; not quite old, but a long way from the eager-eyed hipsters fresh out of college who swarm through our industry like goldfish in a pet store &#8212; he was probably imagining how he&#8217;s going to look in a blue smock with &#8220;Welcome to WalMart&#8221; printed on the chest.<\/p>\n<p>Not quite as iconic an image as that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shorpy.com\/migrant-mother\">famous portrait<\/a> Dorothea Lange captured 73 years ago, but it haunts me just the same&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There was another round of layoffs at work today, a big one. Looking for the positive aspects, it did take out a couple of people who&#8217;ve been thorns in my side, but also a few more friends, which really sucks. As before, I remain reasonably confident that my own job isn&#8217;t going anywhere any time [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}