My heart sank when I saw Arlene from HR standing by the receptionist's desk. I had a feeling that the meeting invitation in my e-mail, the one with no subject, would be bad news. And when my boss joined Arlene, it confirmed my worst fear.

Not more than a month before the merger, I sat in a fine restaurant with my old boss and the programming manager as we celebrated my fifteenth year on the job. What praises gushed forth then! I had improved so much and become such a valuable asset to the department. I'd been promoted three times in ten years, and people respected my talent and opinions. I felt so safe then. Not smug, but I felt secure, believing that I would one day retire from the company a satisfied, happy man.

But that was over two years before.  One Tuesday morning I walked into the office and noticed the atmosphere wasn't quite right. People huddled in groups of two or three, having hushed conversations in front of their cubicles. No one was really focused on work. In fact, nobody was focused on much of anything except a news report printed from a website: "BANKS ANNOUNCE MERGER," blared the headline. Ken handed the story to me. "Oh, shoot!" I shot in disbelief. My mind went blank. How could this happen? I thought. We'd always been committed to staying independent. Who was this other bank? No one ever heard of them; they were some company with a funny name from Ohio.

I sat down in my cube, in the old brown swivel chair I'd named "the Fighting Chair" for all the big projects I'd fought and landed while sitting in it. I felt sick to my stomach as uncertainty grabbed at me for the first time since...I couldn't remember when. There were always good jobs to jump to around town. At least, I thought there were. It had been so long since I'd tested the waters, I didn't know what was still out there, or even if I'd fit in the market.

I decided the best thing was to get to work. I snapped on my computer and got on with my day. But it wasn't just another day at the office. Nor would any day that followed be the same. E-mails from On High and meetings with department heads only revealed that no one knew exactly what would happen in the near future; their best advice was to continue on with our work and stay positive. They'd share whatever news came their way. Right, I thought, just like you shared the merger. Cripes, the news services had the story before we did. Obviously neither side wanted a mass exodus of knowledgable people; the conversion and turnover work would have been nightmarish. Rumors buzzed through the department like swarms of gnats on a spring afternoon. The new company was a sweatshop. Everyone was expected to work fifty-hour weeks whether they were busy or not. The weak, and those who resisted, were regularly purged.

Not long after, projects began to die, one by one as the merger date approached. Work that had been vital to the long-term survival of the company one month ago was discarded like paper from a bird cage. Finally, word came out about what would happen to the staff. Some, whose work was considered valuable to the new company, would be offered jobs. Everyone else would receive fairly-generous severance packages; two weeks' pay for every year of service. In my heart I hoped for a package. Thirty weeks paid vacation! I could goof off all summer and still have money to keep us afloat until I found a new job. That is, if I could find a new job that paid as well as what I'd made. I began to look at my co-workers differently. These people had long been my friends; we suffered through tough projects and easy ones together for a third of my life. Now, they were competitors. The local job market couldn't absorb all of us, and if push came to shove I would do what I needed to do to take care of my family, even if it meant going head to head with people whom I'd helped and who helped me, people I respected and counted myself lucky to know.

It never came to that, at least not for me. The new owners saw some potential in the system my team supported and kept us on basically unscathed. Eventually everyone knew their fate; our once-united staff now fell into two groups; those who had jobs and those who had packages. I couldn't determine which group was luckier. The package people continued on with conversion work until the day before turnover. About that time, all the old bank's signage disappeared from around town and the new company's logos appeared. The new bank's ad campaigns started playing on local radio stations, complete with a jingle from a 60's song. Fourteen hundred people across the state became unemployed to the tune of "Na-na-na-na, hey heee-ey, good-bye!"

Day One for the new employer felt strange, like I'd stepped through the Looking Glass. I had my same old beige-burlap cubicle with the brown swivel chair, the same old computer, and most of the same old team. But the same old computer now talked to a different computer, which had a very different way of doing things. And I had a new identity: I was now E2617735.EM368. After a frustrating day of typing my old ID out of reflex my fingers finally acclimated and I could sign on without difficulty. Our team also had a new boss. She seemed nice enough, but she was a business analyst. She hadn't come up through the software side of the business. Could she understand the development process, and how good work requires thorough testing, and testing requires time? I turned my attention to my new projects, and for the first few months things went along smoothly.

Then came the users from Hell. They came with a funds-transfer project, and we could not make our ideas clear to each other. Even though they were bankers, and I'd worked side-by-side with bankers forever, it seemed that they had no idea about the simple concepts I tried to get across. I might as well have used words like "watermelon" for "debit" and "peacock" for "credit." I tried explaining my ideas as though I was teaching fifth-graders: "Now, to me, 'monthly average balance' means that you add up each day's ending balance for a month and divide by the number of days in the month. Is that what it means to you?" They assured me that it did, but when my reports arrived, somehow they were always wrong. "No," they whined, "we meant that you streusel the pup tent and glove the seal." I tried using interpreters from the home-office staff; it didn't help. Finally, mercifully, the project was reassigned. But my sterling reputation had suffered, and I was mad. I couldn't give them what they wanted if they couldn't tell me what it was! And I was scared. I no longer had the home-court advantage; most of the people who would have given me a break were gone. I knew I could survive the debacle, but I couldn't afford the damage from another one.

The removal of the funds-transfer nightmare freed me to work on my next big project, described as an interface between my system and the General Ledger system. Nearly immediately I realized that this "interface" wouldn't merely be a couple of programs to translate data from one format to another. Upper Management wanted to know how much revenue the bank gave away in discounts. The interface quickly became a job to recalculate every service charge at full price and report the differences. Doing so would be complicated enough; there are hundreds of different service charges attached to business accounts. Some charges were calculated by activity, like a per-check charge. Some were calculated based on the customer's total balance, which meant gathering balance information from different accounts; sometimes the relationships were contained in one bank; sometimes they contained accounts from several. I worked fifty-hour weeks and a few sixty-hour ones to have the interface in its infancy by the project deadline. But I hit it, and it worked. Sadly, it didn't work perfectly; there were always one or two anomaly accounts that required tweaking. At the same time, new banks in the company came on the system. I was trying to build a seven-headed beast and throw new, untested charges into it. It was a project that was born to lose, but I was in charge of making it a winner.

That fall, my wife and I planned a week's vacation Up North. Our son left for college the month before, and we were celebrating the achievement of becoming empty-nesters. The day before I left, the boss called me into a conference room. She handed me a paper, which contained the bank's basic philosophies. Some of them were straightforward, such as "We are honest." Others were more oblique, written in motivation-speak: "We Execute Plus One." She asked me which of them I felt I was having trouble with. I told her I wasn't having trouble with any of them. She then handed me a list of several perceived shortcomings and gave me a week to come up with a plan to address them. I was constantly behind schedule. I didn't get along with my co-workers. True, I had room for improvement, but a lot had been thrown at me in a short time. And some of her "shortcomings" were pure baloney. The only co-worker I had trouble with was Jim, her new hot-shot lead programmer, who took over the lead for the system we'd supported for four years.

I put the paper in my desk. I couldn't get my head back into work. What was wrong with me? I never had this kind of trouble in my life! I sat and stared at the wall behind my desk for the rest of the morning. I knew if I stayed there she'd ruin me, but there was no place to jump. Staff cuts, not hiring, were the norm in most of the big-iron data processing shops in town. A few places advertised for people with client-server experience, but I didn't know an Oracle from an orifice.

We left on our vacation. It went pretty well until Thursday afternoon. I found myself driving north out of St. Ignace thinking about how to process recurring fees. When we got back to our hotel I couldn't even enjoy being with my wife. I had stress like I never knew before; it was about to get worse.

The following Monday I returned to the office and sorted through the 117 e-mails that had piled up while I was gone. Most of them were from people who copied everyone they knew about project questions and answers, mostly to cover their butts in case someone tried to blame them for any reason at all. A meeting invitation to discuss my plan for improvement awaited. I accepted the meeting and got the list out of the desk. I addressed each one as calmly and fortrightly as I could, but the stress invaded my attitude and came out in a strange way: I used bombs and skulls-and-crossbones for bullet points. The boss said she was disappointed. I was disappointed too, mostly that I hadn't had an opportunity to get the hell out of there. She declared we needed to meet weekly to discuss my progress. "The bar's been raised," she said. Yeah, I thought, to club me like a baby seal.

Each week we had our meeting. Each week she told me that I couldn't continue on the way I was. That my work was unsuitable for a person in my position. That I had to get in or get out. I'm scrambling to get out, I thought. There's just no place to get out to! Each week I pointed out accomplishments; they were minimized or dismissed, without exception. And each week I went back to my desk exhausted, sometimes too dazed to work, sometimes nearly in tears. But I pressed on. I dug in and focused on perfecting the interface. I still had a conversion to do every month, and features to add as new banks needed them, and bugs to find and fix. I focused on keeping a good attitude, particularly with Jim. He was just there to do a job, the same as I was, and he didn't need any grief. I accepted his help as it was offered; some of his suggestions actually were pretty good.

I also went back to working straight forty-hour weeks. The overtime was making trouble at home, and I figured I could replace my job before I could replace my wife. Crunch time happens in the IT business. We all understand that, and when it comes we all dig in and get the job done. But my new employers had no qualms about expecting unpaid overtime all the time. I concluded that if they paid me for forty hours of work and I only did thirty, they'd think themselves cheated; paying for forty and demanding fifty, though, was all right with them. It seemed they were only against dishonesty when they were the victims of it.

The "counseling sessions" went on for about ninety days. Two days before Christmas the programming manager sat in on our meeting. I did a quick self-evaluation at my desk beforehand. I got the boss's list out and scanned the items line by line. That one's good, I thought to myself. Hmmm, could do better there. OK, that one's pretty good. Overall I thought I had improved to the point where we could put the whole silly episode behind us and get on with business. I stepped out of my cube with something resembling renewed confidence coursing through me.

The boss pulled out a paper as I sat down. It was a written warning, detailing all of the problems and none of the improvements. The air shot out of my lungs like I'd been hit in the chest with a baseball bat. Your project's still behind and you're still having problems, she said. Of course I'm having problems! I thought. You've given me six months to rewrite the damn system! How I wish now I'd said that out loud. Instead, I pointed out that I'd supported the system for four years, worked with the vendor for seventeen years, and had been programming for over twenty years. If I couldn't handle it, I asked, who could?

"In your case," she said, "almost anybody." My whole body tensed. I could have lept across the table and choked her until her eyes rolled back in her head.

The programming manager asked me what I was going to do. "I don't know," I told him. At that point I was out of ideas. He pointed out that just recently the Michigan State basketball coach gave the same answer to a question about how he planned to improve the team, and he got fired for it. I thought, Well, isn't that the end-game here? If you're going to fire me, why don't you just do it and quit torturing me? I just sat there, slumped over the table. "This isn't me," I mumbled over and over. "I know this isn't me."

Mercifully the meeting ended and I slunk back to my desk. By then I knew the situation couldn't be salvaged. I was playing out the clock. The only thing I could do was to give the job my best effort and pray that a position would open up before the clock struck.

I decided to go down swinging. I kept improving the interface, cleaning up processes here and there, adding new ones as needed. In a given month it processed several thousand accounts. Each new bank we converted brought its own challenges, its own special way of doing things. And there were always one or two accounts that just wouldn't balance. I spent the next couple of months chasing down and squashing niggling little exceptions. Finally, after some major surgery to divide one complicated process into two simple ones, the job ran straight through without any hitches. I was so overjoyed! It was the Friday before my birthday, and I couldn't have gotten a better present. "I'm going to lunch," I told the boss, and I left with my friends. Over lunch, I told them about the meetings and the mysterious invitation for 4:00 that afternoon. "If I had to work for your boss," one said, "I'd rather be unemployed." The boss had a reputation that went beyond tough straight to meanness. It was well-earned. She got her way by bullying her underlings. There were other horror stories, but none that ended with a late-Friday meeting.

We returned from lunch. I planned to start on phase two of my upgrades. When I arrived in my cube, I found a birthday cake from the boss on my desk. She made cakes for her team members' birthdays. It was chocolate, my favorite, with green sprinkles in the frosting in commemoration of my St. Patrick's Day birthday. It seemed a little odd to have it three days before. Would I be around on Monday to celebrate? I wondered. That couldn't have been it. If she was going to fire me why would she make me a cake? Under most circumstances it would have been a nice gesture; it was unsettling that day.

Four o'clock came. I stood up from the Fighting Chair and walked to the conference room where I'd had weekly meeting with my old team for ten years. Even when things went badly I've had happier times in here, I thought as I stepped inside. Arlene and the boss sat down. The boss handed me one last paper: A Notice of Termination.

"We tried to work with you," she began. Yeah, I thought, if you call impossible demands and verbal abuse 'working with someone.' I didn't hear anything else. I just stood up when the talking ended. Arlene from HR walked me back to my cubicle. I got my corporate credit card out of the desk, cut it in half, and handed the pieces to her. Jim came over to talk about phase two. "I guess that's your problem now," I said as I picked up my keys. We walked to the door, where I handed over my badge. As I walked to my truck on a sunny afternoon I felt sad and relieved at the same time, like a dying relative had finally succumbed. I'd suffered a shattering loss, but at least the pain had ended.