As some of you may have heard, the company I work for is engaged in some pretty serious layoffs (roughly 5,300 people worldwide; ~11% of their workforce). Knowing that, you can probably imagine my reaction when I came in to the office this weekend to finish up some work for a database migration after a week-long vacation and discovered that my cubicle was vacant except for my personal effects. Notably, the two computers that had been there when I left, along with all their peripherals, were gone.

I was surprised that, if I had been laid off, I’d still have physical access to the building and network access. Confused, I called my manager, which only made things weirder: he didn’t know what was going on either. I rolled that around in my head for a bit, and the thought crossed my mind that if he didn’t know, maybe our entire team was gone. I wandered down to the trading floor, but his desk was still intact. I checked my email from another machine in the office, found that I was still able to get in, and that nothing in there indicated my untimely departure (though I did realize I forgot to set my out-of-office notification. Oops.)

I wandered in this morning, and surprised my cubicle-group-mates; they thought given my absence and the disappearance of my hardware that I’d been sacked. I limped along on another computer that wasn’t configured properly to let me do my work, but would at least let me check my email and do a few other things. I was finally able to confirm that yes, I was still employed…so who took my computer?

On the way back to my newly-appropriated desk, I had a thought: I wonder if someone thought that the equipment in my cubicle belonged to the previous occupant, who did leave the company recently. On a hunch, I called the helpdesk, and sure enough, this was in fact the case. In a couple of hours, I had my old machine back. Well, less the webcam, headset, and stereo cables. I guess those will come back tomorrow.

I guess I didn’t need to get any work done today anyway…