Well, it could have been worse.
I work in the IT department of a medical center allied with a large Ivy-League university. This university has been in the papers recently, because the endowment has apparently lost something like billion dollars in the market since the downturn. Money from the endowment goes directly to pay salaries for Central Administration, which contains my department.
Today my group got an urgent message to gather for a meeting with management 1:30 pm. Rumors immediately started to swirl. 12 people from a department of 100 were being let go. 25% of my group were going to be let go. All of us were being let go. Gallows humor ran rampant.
1:30 came and our managers and the CIO appeared. The CIO prefaced the announcement by noting the bad state of the economy, and said that the Dean of the medical school had enforced 10% budget cuts in all departments in Central Admin, including us. Since virtually all of our budget comes from salaries, he had no choice but to cut 10 positions. The good news was that
everyone in the room still had a job. Looking around I saw no representatives from the web design group. Those poor bastards had all been let go.
I don't have a big point here. This isn't breaking news. The economy sucks and people, good people, are losing their jobs. The (former) head of web design has like 5 kids in college. My heart goes out to all those who are facing an uncertain future. It seems like that includes every one of us right now.