The Six Stages of a Downfall (The Last Day at Convoy):

First was fear.

I woke up on what I assumed was a normal day. Upon turning off my alarm I noticed several texts from a few of my close co-workers in a group chat.?

"Did you see the email?" "Check the email!" "I can't believe this is happening!" "Do you think we're getting sold?" "Who are we getting sold to?"

At this point, I had already been through four grotesque rounds of layoffs. The feeling of terror bubbling up in my stomach was all too familiar and rarely surprised me anymore. You always wonder 'Is it me? Is today the day I get laid off and thrown into the unknown?' But after going through so many rounds and not seeing an HR rep meeting on your calendar, you begin to wonder if it will ever happen. You almost wish it would, so you didn’t have to live in fear of it. I grab my computer with shaky fingers.?

Pulling up the email it reads something along the lines of "Please work with your teams to cancel all Convoy shipments for this week and next. We are preparing for changes in business in the coming days. Do not accept any more tenders, send out shipments to brokerage, or book any drivers."?

All future shipments? There have been rumors and speculation in the news for a while about a sale of the company, it was no secret that the company was losing money, evident by a drop in freight prices, gross misuse of funds in expansive office buildings, and the approximately 1,500 people that had been laid off or fled in the last two years.

But canceling that many loads? We've been through a lot of crazy times here at Convoy, but I started going through the situation in my head. How could we recover after canceling so many shipments we've been tendered? Some of the verbiage on the email insinuated we might be being sold. But even if we were sold, how would we recover customer trust and sentiment after canceling hundreds of shipments that we had promised to service? If all the news and rumors weren't enough, there was no way the company’s name and brand could come back from this. So was this really it? Was this really the end? On a random Wednesday with no warning? Or was there a possibility we were getting sold and we would still have a job? Or would some of us still have a job? Who would the new buyer be and would they have any use for us?

Am I being naive?

Have I been naive these past two years? Have I been dumb to have hope? To have faith?

"You need to get here now" was the next text. I could only imagine the feeling of unease at the office right now. I got my ass up and headed out.

Upon arriving, my friends and I commiserated and shared what we thought could happen, what we thought would happen, and everything in between. I sat down at my desk, for what I didn't know was the last time, and started sending out emails and comms canceling loads and apologizing to customers. Apologizing graciously is something that customer service professionals excel at, and today it definitely came in handy.

Eventually, one of my coworkers, one I had come to know as a very diligent worker, leaned over the glass divider and peered at me. "Are you actually working?"

I looked up at her with helplessness. "Yes? I don't know?"

She told me that a high-ranking executive had come around to all of them just a few minutes before I arrived and told them just to stop. To just take the rest of the day off, there was no point.?

I'll obviously never know his exact words, but if someone that high up is really saying that? Who's to save us now?

Not really knowing what else to do I kept working for a few minutes as the air in the office continued to shift.

?

Second was brotherhood.

As the mood changed from one of speculation to one of acceptance, everyone began to start exchanging tips for moving forward.

Someone mentioned that we would need our payslips for unemployment. Another looked up how many months worth of slips we would need to apply, and another showed us how to download all the pay slips we needed en masse, instead of one at a time. "Don't forget to email yourself your performance reviews to help you with job interviews!" someone called. "Where can we find those?" Someone else asked.

All of a sudden we were all strong and unified. We had accepted what was happening, and it was grim, but together, we were going to hit the ground running.

Someone would show me something necessary to prepare for our departure, or even just a quick shortcut to something, then I returned the favor by showing it to the next coworker I came across that needed help. And on and on the pattern went. I could tell just the simple document preparation and sharing of information was calming the group.

It sounds so stupid, but the comradery of it all nearly brought me to tears. I've been in clubs, in sports, in a Sorority even, but this seemed different. We were adults, and even when our next paycheck was up in the air, people were still taking time to help one another. Obviously what was happening was devastating, and I had no idea how my job search would go in this market, but I could not be more proud of the people I stood beside as everything was crashing and burning around us.

?

Third was anarchy.

Ironically, the Culture Committee I was on (whose main purpose was planning employee bonding events and happy hours for our large operations department) had a Halloween-themed happy hour planned that day. I just assumed we were canceling it.

The head of the Culture Committee, however, confirmed something along the lines of "No, the orders are all placed, everything's already in motion, it's happening." In more or less words, fuck it.?

And he was right, everything was underway. The drink order arrived, we got the ice buckets out, my friends and I started setting up decor, and they placed the pizza order. It was all so surreal and felt strikingly wrong, but it truly didn't matter at this point. Workplace nihilism was taking over.

After decorating I walked back to my desk just to check if I had any messages from my managers or fellow coworkers who had chosen to watch the fall of Rome from their own homes. As I walked through the infamous 7th floor of the Russell Investments Center, I saw even more surreal sights.

There were groups of people sitting at lunch tables in the atrium, a beautiful room we used to have posh weekly lunches and watch weekly company updates from. Respected people, people in Sales or Project Management maybe, no doubt people more important than me. However, there wasn't a laptop in sight, only freshly opened beers and ciders dotted the tables. I didn't even know if it was noon yet. Another stab went through my heart at the sight, again reminding me it really was over. We weren't going to make it to a sale. Everyone seems to know; there's no point in working.

In the main aisles of desks, a bar cart that had been bestowed the title of the 'Exec's bar cart' or 'For closing deal celebrations' or something of the like, had moved to a more central area. The cart had been ransacked, and bottles were being passed around. Another cardboard box full of bottles had appeared, from storage, and provided an even more plentiful selection to assist in the grim celebrations.

I couldn't help but laugh at the merrymaking going on around me. It was like we were at someone's funeral but they had an open bar and no one really seemed sad enough. But again, as many of my friends and colleagues asserted, we were just trying to drown out the disappointment. Deep into numbness, we fell.

I found a quieter desk away from the din to stop and breathe. I texted my parents and my partner about what was going on. I feared an 'I told you so' from my parents, who had been urging me to jump ship before it sank, but thankfully it never came—only sympathy. My boyfriend, always optimistic, pointed out they hadn't officially announced it yet. "It's pretty official, tbh" I texted back. We knew.

I watched as some people cut out earlier in the day, ransacking the snacks and food as they went. I saw a guy take a few full bottles of alcohol from the bar cart. I saw someone pocketing handfuls of Nespresso pods into their backpack. Another was picking up fresh and untouched sticky note pads from the desks. So much waste, so much ruin. I was both impressed and shocked, it only took the impending doom of no income and a rumored no severance to turn us animalistic. And I was no better than any of my peers.

I went back to enjoy our lovingly planned Halloween happy hour, as it had been a few hours into the afternoon and I accepted that it was time for me to take advantage of the white wine bottles before me, as it is probably my last chance. As the day wore on, things continued to get strange as we processed our emotions.?

We ended up clearing a large space in the atrium to play that game where you swing the golf balls attached to strings at a set of PVC pipe bars. I think it's called ladder ball. I have no idea where an entire ladderball set came from but, then again, random things always seemed to appear in the office. That was part of the reason I loved it so much. Soft autumn sunlight streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Windows that I had hoped to have lunches in front of for years to come. I watched my friends play rounds of ladderball in between bouts of crying together, hugging, joking, and searching the fridge for more drinks, soon to be forgotten in this big empty office.

Slowly, people packed up and started saying their final goodbyes. I received hugs from people I never imagined I'd be hugging. We made promises to each other of meeting up, and contacting each other on Instagram or LinkedIn, but we had no idea if any of these promises would be kept. I might never see so many of these people I had come to respect so highly ever again. Checking the clock, I was shocked it wasn't even 4 PM yet. I felt like I'd lived through several days.

Soon there weren't many of us left. So we said our final goodbyes to the crisp white walls and stunning views and headed to a nearby bar for some more tears.

?

Fourth was indifference.

The next day, after a ridiculous goodbye from the exec team over Zoom, in which none of us really knew or cared whose fault it was anymore, it was over. At 5 PM our laptops would lock remotely and we would have absolutely no access to anything on it.

Some of us hung around in Slack a little bit longer, a communication platform that I had come to adore. We threw around a few more inside jokes about freight and the people we'd come to know, visited a few of our favorite channels for the last time, and sent a few more hilarious custom emotes. I found and saved some photos I had taken of me and my friends being silly on Zoom together. Then everything gradually went silent as the impending lockout approached.

I reopened my dusty unemployment application I hadn't seen since the beginning of Covid when I was furloughed from my front desk job. I filled out all the necessary forms and got them sent for processing. Then I closed my computer and stared blankly at my TV.

A common trauma response, I fell asleep that afternoon. When I woke up, I didn't even check my laptop. I didn't even check if it was locked until the next day or a few days later I think. It didn't matter.

And the emptiness of being unemployed ensued. I took about a week to rot on the couch and play video games. I knew people who had started applying for jobs even before we were officially unemployed, I knew people who had started applying for jobs while we were at the bar the day we got laid off. But I wasn't ready for that. I needed to numb the sadness. Numb the fact that everything we’d worked for, skills we built up, and workflows we perfected, were gone, vanished in a day. Useless. And if my generation had learned anything in a new age of mental health awareness, it's how to give ourselves grace. So I did. But within a few days, a few weeks, the feeling of uselessness grew within me.

Fifth was anger.

My strong desire to not let this setback end my post-college stint in corporate (and honestly probably a lot of luck) helped me in securing a job about 3 months from Convoy's end. I was eternally thankful, but as soon as I started my new job I couldn't help but feel angry.

As soon as I got my new laptop and started being thrown into new workflows, I felt the anger and frustration I always knew I would feel when Convoy inevitably either collapsed or laid me off. Like any job, after all the time and dedication spent discovering all the nuances and nooks and crannies of what I did, I felt that I was good at what I was doing at Convoy. I was familiar with the ins and outs of our system, how to do work more efficiently by learning helpful shortcuts, and how to search for seemingly lost documents or order numbers. I had customer contacts memorized, really any of the things that come with being in a position for a while. And after nearly 2 years, my work was going so smoothly that I could spend time learning how to implement new customers or streamline slower processes.

Now I was being thrown back into the very beginning, after I worked so hard, learned so much, and asked so many questions to become good at a job that I loved. I was mad.?

I was faced with feeling like a burden on those who were obligated to train me while also keeping up with their own daily workflow. It made me yearn for the efficiency and modernity that Convoy had, but I knew that was a foolish thought. Obviously Convoy had misused time and resources to train up too many people too fast. But I still couldn't help but miss having a dedicated training team, even though they were most likely a waste of company funds at the time.?

Aside from being good and efficient at what I did, I was also on the up and up. I was on the trajectory to grow and potentially step into a different position in the coming years. Now, not only was I stepping back into square one for my day-to-day, I was back to square one with my career trajectory too, ripped away from all the amazing mentors I had come to know and respect who would take time out of their day to teach me new skills.

My heart broke as days wore on at my new job, and I thought about all the wonderful faces I saw every day at Convoy. Both people I knew well, and people I'd just had one or two conversations with. They were all so incredible, and my heart shattered knowing we'd never be in the same place all together again. The obligation to be near each other was taken away in a moment, due to mismanagement of funds by people who didn't even know us, nor did they know the care we had for each other.

Lastly was pride.

When it was all said and done, I was proud.

I was proud that I made it so far. I made it to the final, bitter end. 4 rounds of layoffs, down to a final and complete dissolution of the last 500 of us. I had made it all the way to the final castle to beat Bowser and rescue Princess Peach. But, as resilient as I felt, I am no Super Mario. Instead of a princess, our prize for being the "best," and "most dedicated" workers who made it all the way to the final battle was the opposite of a prize. It was no severance and no extended healthcare. Many thought we were lucky to get our last paycheck.

I understand that not all tech layoffs right now (in a potential recession) are merit-based, and a lot of decisions can come along with what department you're in, your salary, and many other factors. But either way, someone somewhere up the line kept me, and many of my incredible peers, on board for the grand finale. And all the grief and survivor's guilt I had felt so many times after countless friends were laid off and cast to the side, slowly morphed into a different feeling. It may have been at different times, but ultimately we all were sent to the same fate. And I was proud of all of us, different tenures and different roles aside, for being a part of something that became so special to some of us.

I was also incredibly proud of how much I had learned. I learned so much and came out a better worker, more professional, more valuable, and it was quickly evident that my skills in a corporate setting grew so much in two short years. As I settled into my new place of work, I kept noticing more skills I had acquired or grown into: How to navigate the unknown. My resiliency to hardship. How I carry myself. How to be confident when speaking with managers. Workplace social skills (simply having the bravery to just TALK to people in the office). Interview and improvisation skills. Having the mental preparation to learn super nuanced accounts and workflows. And I'm sure there are more skills I have carried over from my time at Convoy I haven't even discovered.?

Sure some of these are just a part of growing up, but I can't help but look back and know my peers and mentors at Convoy had such a kind and holistic way of teaching me that they played a huge part.?

As crestfallen as I and many others are, whenever someone asks me about how I'm doing or what I think about Convoy now, I would tell them the truth, but I always end with "I'm thankful I stayed."

No, of course, I'm not thankful to those who mismanaged funds, who were greedy, or who potentially led to the layoffs of my friends and the overall downfall of the company. I'm not thankful for those who threw away so many bright individuals, those of us who worked our way up from weekends or late shifts after months (or in my case over a year), or those of us who didn't take advantage of our PTO or worked unpaid and late hours for fear we would be the next on the chopping block. I’m not thankful that these same people still sold the company’s tech off, leaving some of the living breathing people who created it to struggle.

But I am thankful for the opportunity. I am thankful for the people who took a chance on me when I was hired despite not having a corporate background.? I'm thankful for the timing and opportunity lining up perfectly. I'm thankful for my friends; strong, hardworking, and fun; who welcomed me with open arms and helped me feel comfortable and confident in my first corporate setting. I would not be able to call myself a corporate professional today had Convoy and I not taken a chance on each other.

I really am proud of what we accomplished, despite the bitter, chaotic, and tragic end. I was glad I was there to see it.