Amalgamation

The corporate experience is not complete without the threat of being downsized. I was convinced my job would be downsized when senior management decided to change the position of 'shadow experts' who work within many of the bank's departments.

'Shadow experts?' you ask. A fair question.

There are large departments for things like IT, human resources and communications. But in addition to these departments, there are also much smaller groups of IT or HR experts, sometimes just one or two individuals, working within functional departments like Finance, Compliance, Legal, and so on. These individuals are 'shadow' experts, as their work mirrors that of another full department, but on a much smaller scale. Sound complicated? That's why management wanted to change, by getting rid of these shadow experts and having absolutely everyone on HR issues, for example, report only to the actual HR department.

It's an amalgamation, in other words.

My colleague and I met with someone from Communications. He was new and we thought he just wanted to introduce himself. He had a serious air to him, and two minutes into the meeting he let us know that at his last job, for a British multinational, he was the chief communicator at a time when 5,000 staff were let go.

Well, isn't that a nice way to introduce yourself? Might as well change your name to Mr. Carpetbagger to ensure we all get the message.

My colleague and I sat there as Carpetbagger explained how his mandate was to look for synergies between communicators, which we understood immediately as an evil plot to fuck up our carefully constructed independence.

The meeting ended politely and we returned to our desks.

'What the hell was that about?' we asked each other, 'Was that the devil? Did you see any actual horns?'

This was just what I needed to keep my mind off work.