Word of the day: pyrrhic

I have a lame word of the day calendar. I say lame because I want insane polysyllabic words that’ll make me sound smarter, and on November 13, the word of the day was actually “weird.”

Today’s word:
Pyrrhic: adj \ achieved at excessive cost; also: costly to the point of negating or outweighing expected benefits.

Example sentence: My keeping my job was a pyrrhic victory, because Coworker S lost hers in my place.

When the dust finally settled today I still had my job. Sadly, and I totally mean that, Coworker S was among the 30+ talented people who lost hers. It’s like they made a list of all of the awesome, hard workers and laid half of them off. (And added one complete buffoon to the mix just so we’d have something to cheer, but that victory belongs to another department.)

I hired her years ago when I was a hotshot manager. She’s funny, creative, talented and helped me pick up the pieces when BvP and I split up. We took walks to the 7-11 across the street, had numerous pizza lunches, and even more happy hour drinks together. She was my work best friend. We sat next to each other for years. And now that seat is empty. And although she’ll always be my friend (we’re going to see Twilight sometime this weekend) it’s going to be damn lonely.

I’m not even processing the fact that I have to do 2x the work yet. I don’t care. What gets done, gets done. I could rage about the “Hey…I thought Online was our future?” issue, but the powers that be are sitting in an ostentatious building in Virginia, and out of the range of my voice. And, you know…whatever. It’s not my company to run, thank God. I just can’t get past the fact that when push came to shove, they sacked the single mom and let the higher-paid one stay. It makes no sense, not morally, and not fiscally.

I have a raging headache and feel sick to my stomach. So I’m off to bed. Tomorrow I’ll load up my iPod with crap and try to forget that 99% of the people I loved working with are gone.

Tags: grief, layoffs