I’ve deliberately held back on posting this, but on Friday April 18th I was made redundant from lastminute.com
I held back because I didn’t want to post anything in haste that I would later regret. Yes I feel angry, yes I feel that they stitched me up, and no, I wouldn’t use their services (particularly with a credit card) if my life depended on it.
The culture in lastminute.com (and that’s the last time I will deliberately add the .com anymore – I don’t have to put a pound in their corporate swear box) is ‘trendy’ to the point of being strained. They still have a ‘chill out room’ in their very expensive offices in central Westminster with both table tennis and table football, how very nineties!
And, to be fair, they played the game on the ‘consultancy’ period of the redundancy process. They were laying off around 15% of their UK employees and we were ‘encouraged’ to apply for internal roles. However when I was contacted by an external agency about one internal role then I realised they were simply going through the motions.
And when I heard a senior manager demanding “a good degree from a good university” then I knew the writing was on the wall for me, I only have thirty years real-world experience.
I wish them well, and if I said I wasn’t bitter then I’d be lying, but I suspect that they’re going to struggle to survive, and they will feel an increasingly tightening grip from the hands of their owners in the USA.
It’ll be lastminute Jim, but not as they know it.
As for me, well I have a few ideas for starting up on my own; and will, of course, try and find a ‘real’ job, but I recognise that in the current economic climate (impeding ice age) these will be few and far between.
In the short term, rather than sitting around for two weeks saying “We’re doomed” (a la Fraser in “Dad’s Army”) we’re doing it on a beach in Sri Lanka, which is where I’m typing this to upload when we get back.
See the Sri Lanka pictures here.