The account that's making me do uncomfortable maths
An anonymous corporate gossip account, some uncomfortable maths, and a quiet case for having something of your own before you need it.
A colleague, an account, and a lost evening
A younger colleague added me to an Instagram account a while back. "You'll find this interesting," she said, which in hindsight was a polite way of saying I was about to lose an hour of my evening.
It started, I think, as a page for grad program gossip. Who got an offer, who didn't, which bank was slow to reply. Harmless enough. It's grown into something else since then.
Restructuring gossip next to team lunch polls
Now it's mostly anonymous submissions about restructuring. "Anon please" posts, one after another, about teams being cut, roles moved offshore, whole departments quietly told to expect news before the new financial year starts.
It's not only that, to be fair. The same account will just as happily rank the five most generous parental leave policies in the country, or run a poll asking whether you're actually obligated to go to the team Christmas lunch (a genuinely contested question, it turns out). It's a strange, useful, slightly unhinged little corner of the internet.
The maths I keep doing
The restructuring posts are the ones that stay with me. None of it's verified. Someone messages the account, the account posts it, nobody fact checks it because nobody can. I don't know if half of it is exaggerated or all of it is exactly right.
What I do know is that I scroll it now and then, and I do this odd bit of maths in my head each time. If even a fraction of these posts are true, that's not an abstract statistic. That's a lot of actual people, sitting at actual desks right now, who don't know it yet.
I've sat on the other side of that call
I used to read redundancy news the way most people do. A headline, a number, a brief "that's rough," then on with the day. This account changed that a bit, because it's not headlines. It's someone's actual message, unpolished, probably sent from their phone on a lunch break, probably a bit rattled.
I know that week. Not through an anonymous account, just the plain old phone call, the calendar invite that didn't say what it was really about. The strange mix of shock and, if I'm honest, a small flicker of something like relief, because at least the waiting is over.
What most people in those posts don't have yet
Most of the people behind those anonymous messages don't have anything of their own. Not a business, not a side project, not even a hobby that could earn a bit of money if it had to. Just the one job, and now a gap where it used to be.
I don't think that's a failing on their part. I think most of us are set up that way. One income, one identity, until something forces the question.
A window nobody asked for
If even half of what that account describes is real, there's a lot of people about to have a window they didn't ask for. Some will find another job quickly and never think about it again. Some won't, and that gap will sit there longer than they'd like. A few, maybe, will finally start the thing they've been meaning to for years, the cakes, the sharpening service, the plant stall, whatever it is they're quietly good at.
I hope it's more of the last group than usual. Not because I've built something for them to use, though I have, but because having something of your own, even a small one, changes what that gap feels like when it opens.