After tomorrow, rush hour traffic should be delightfully light, phones will be eerily quiet, Outlook calendars will have blank spaces,email boxes will not be quite so full,and cubicle workers will not have to plug in iPod earbuds just to drown out the noise from fellow workers.Ah yes, it's beginning to feel a like like Christmas Corporate American Style .

This is one widget I wish I didn't have to put on my blog. But,when you write about business/careers/worklife this is the Big Story. 1.9 million people have lost their jobs in 2008 - with one million of those losing their jobs since September.

There's a lot of speculation lately about what Americans talk about at the kitchen table.  Well my kitchen table has become the hub for our discussions about the state of the economy and the impact on our family.  You won't find any political rhetoric and homey colloquialisms in our dialogs.  No, we talk about real-life issues like the risk of my 52-year old cousin losing her job due to corporate downsizing.  To protect her identity, I'll call her "Jane Six-Pack".

Tomorrow is my daughter's last day as a shift manager at our local coffee shop. There was no resignation letter. Technically, she is not resigning --she's just not going to be on the schedule since she'll be in Vancouver for her second year of college. The rule is as long as she works once every six weeks, she maintains her employee status. Last year, her manager called her every six weeks and paid her a couple of bucks for the call to maintain her active status. That way, she was able to slide right back into the job without a lot of fuss.

On the day I started my first job on July 7, 1973 ,I knew that I would be eligible for a salary review on July 7, 1974. I counted the days. I lived for the time when I would see a major increase in my $3.25 an hour pay. May I just say that after five years as a reporter, I walked out of WWBT TV making $5.00 an hour.

After competing with hundreds of other newly minted Ph.D.s for a teeny tiny number of positions, if you land a job, you're supposed to feel relieved and grateful, as well as harbor a desire to keep that job for the indefinite future, right? Maybe. The most recent interesting conversation about the academic job market began when junior faculty member Dr. Crazy reported she had been asked for further materials by an institution where she had applied for a job. Someone writing as "webmaster" left this considerably-more-than-snarky comment: Well, we'll keep our fingers crossed, because there's nothing more exciting than having a junior faculty member on board who wasn't able to find her way out 2 consecutive years. Imagine our delight in imagining you might deign to stay here in Pudknocker town another year or two! We will certainly forget your casting around for a better gig when tenure and promotion loom. Do you need any extra letterhead? There is some in the supply closet.

Not long after I started my blog in 2004, I ran across someone who was calling himself a blogomist. Until that time I was still thinking of myself as a newspaper columnist who just happened to be writing on a blog.