...at least you have a job.

Ah the silver lining. I'm getting sick and tired of it. It's really no consolation when you're worried you could lose your job at any minute. That's what my gal is going through right now.

I often make a joke that we married poorly, literally. I'm an artist that will never rise any higher in my pay scale and she's a journalist, who is awesome at her job, and works for a paper that has one of the better payouts, but in this day and age, is shaky at best.

So the artist and the writer started the year, that will be known as the "re-depression", with layoffs at the artist job and the newspaper industry crumbling at the writers job. I was forever worried that they would come for me first. They always fire the artist first. For some reason they think they can magically make designs appear in thin air.

As a VP once said about me, "What? She just pokes a button and the stuff comes out of the printer."

When they let an operations guy and our sales assistant go, after the boss told us no one would go, I spent a weepy lunch with my girl, scared that I would be jobless.

"Well...at least you have your job!" And the sinking sensation that any day I could be let go. Some comfort!

Lucky for me, the only thing that came of that lunch was my soggy tenders. I stayed put and we even got our sales asst back. And within weeks of doomsday, the big cheese had a tele-confrence saying we were over the worst of it.

EXcellent!

Then the papers started falling like a black and white print domino set. And while my girl had good things like her bonus still in the hand, they started merging departments, asking for a bigger ratio of ads over content and had meetings were the topics were: what are you doing for us, what more can you do and how can you do it all on line?

But at least she still has her job.

After making her case that she could increase her workload, take on another blog, start doing her own vlogging (with her flip video cam), and create a whole new beat to cover, the publisher announced that they would be asking them all to take 2 weeks unpaid.

Now she had to do all the additional work....with less time.

But at least she still had her job.

The same day this was announced papers around the country, fired hundreds of folks and kept just enough to keep their 'paper' going on line. Michigan's newspapers, for some reason, imploded in on themselves all at once.

And then, due to technical problems, the press didn't print on time this morning. The negative comments on the paper's website started piling up: "THE END IS COMING FOR THIS FISH RAP" "The web is better and nothing to recycle. Start looking for work, the end is near."

"On another note isn't a "pay cut" better than not having a job at all!"

Cuz......at least you have a job.....right?