Snip, Snip, Snip

When I was 16 my mother finally allowed me to cut my hair...for the first time in my entire life. (Except that one time I set my hair on fire and they had to cut the singed part off.)

I went wild. From hair that tickled my thighs to hair that bounced above my shoulders. It was great, except I couldn't tie it up properly, and it didn't curl right anymore, and braids were impossible...

I decided I'd grow it out again to which a friend of mine shook her head and replied: "Once a cutter, always a cutter."

It's a saying that should have stuck with me. It was a warning I should have heeded.

However, despite the fact that I had been warned years ago to be wary of cutters I was off my guard.

Twelve days before Christmas our company was called to an "All Hands" meeting. As I was setting up chair after chair after chair and untangling the extended polycom (worse that Christmas lights honestly) I amused myself with the idea that everyone would in fact send their hands to the meeting. I had a picture of thousands of Things running around the conference room...grabbing coffee and hopping from the Cafeteria to the room. I imagined them shaking fingers with one another...because shaking hands would be like groping, and that's inappropriate for a meeting...all hands or not.

Suffice it to say, I was pretty giddy and giggly when we all crammed into the room, surrounding the polycom like you'd surround a warm fire and listening to the chestnut song as we waited for the big-wigs (who are ironically mostly hairless...especially the women) to say whatever they wanted to say.

What they said took me back to the year before. As a temp I was called into a department that was working on relocating. While they moved the work to a headquarters across the country, I and a few hangers on bullied away at databases and codes till Thanksgiving. The week of Thanksgiving in fact. When my boss pulled me in said she adored me and that I shouldn't bother coming back in on Monday after the holidays.

Cut.

Oh...and Happy Thanksgiving.

Now I was sitting in a room not but a floor away from the one from last year getting an rare look at the elusive "VP of Human Resources" who never emerges from her protective cave of an office telling us that once again the department is being moved somewhere else.

"Remember," she said all too cheerfully, "you're not being laid off...your being relocated...to another company..."

Cut.

The cheerful warm from a room full of people about to start holiday vacations on cruise ships, the happy go-lucky attitude from people who have just finished their Christmas shopping quickly fell away. Everyone shifted in their seats. Everyone sucked their breath in. Everyone glared.

Didn't they just tell us a few weeks ago that The Washington Post was wrong...the reorg is just a reorg...not a lay-off. Didn't they just say that we were looking good, that we shouldn't worry about the new announcements. Didn't they just tell me that they wanted me to stay for a long, long time this time? Didn't they beg me to come back and promise that I had a "home" here at **********?

No, it's the Holidays and we are once again staring in the face of unemployment, uncertainty, and a HR VP who is really one of the meanest, snarkiest, stuck-up bitches I've ever known, and that was what I thought before she fired us. Yep, once a cutter...always a cutter.

While dumbfounded silence fell over the room a voice crackled through over the whitenoise of the polycom. A deep voice of a man clearly entrenched in our more southern divisions broke through and summed it all up:

"I think I just got my ass fired."

I love that man if only for the brief moment of glee I had while I watched the HR VP rush over to the polycom and panic at all the little buttons.

"How do we silence this?" she asked the air around her.

We'd tell you, I thought, but you just fired the admins.