Welcome to the jungle

There is the smell of fear in my office at present.

When the bottom dropped off the banking system around the world last year I never thought that it would affect me. In the newspapers each day we were reading horror stories of people losing their jobs, images of bankers leaving their offices with their belongings in cardboard boxes were transfixing us but again, I just never saw it happening to me.

Now one by one the Freelancers in my office are having their contracts ended. There is a freeze on commissions from all the channels and because of this new contracts and hiring are just not happening.

What small jobs there are I now have to compete with my friends for. I have to compete with the people who I've been working with for almost 2 years and it's horrible.

I feel exception guilt when I get called in to go and meet with one company and my colleague doesn't.

To make matters worse we have a departmental meeting tomorrow where the near future of our company is going to be explained to us. Staff are foreseeing redundancies and the gossip is that they are going to try and get rid of as many people as possible, bring the staff down to skeleton and then start rehiring people for smaller contracts if and when they actually get commissions.

All I can say about this is go out shopping people! Buy food, buy household products, buy clothing and buy music! My lively hood depends on advertisers putting money down for slots and unless you guys start buying their products it is never going to happen!

You all have my permission to go shopping.