Sacked or Just Offline?

In this day and age, somebody being offline on his Bloomberg can only mean one thing, right?

When I meet with a friend of mine last weekend (who happens to work in Derivatives in a large investment bank) he mentioned that he had been given information about another round of layoffs being announced the following Monday. When wondering whether he could potentially affected, he assured me this would not be the case since he had been doing well over the course of the year, and was continuing to do good business. He rated the chances of him being part of the alleged 15% of the workforce to be let go as fairly slim.

A few days later, I thought I would check with him that everything was fine and tried contacting him via Bloomberg (so it looked like work). He was showing as 'Offline', so I decided to follow up the next day just to make sure. When he was still showing as offline, I started getting concerned since this clearly could only mean one thing: his optimism must have been poor judgement.

As I was about to contact his wife to check whether he was OK, I started remembering that the to-be-announced-layoff was not the only thing we had talked about over drinks, but clearly the only thing that was present in my mind.

It occurred to me that aside from that he had mentioned something about embarking on his long-delayed honeymoon the day after we met up.

Whilst I had already pictured him down at the local Job Centre, it turned out he was enjoying himself in sunnier climes, a few hours flight away from the corporate bloodshed at home.

And that's a much better reason to be offline.

Unfortunately, it's just not necessarily the first reason that springs to mind nowadays.

Originally published on HereIsTheCity Life, the original can be found here.