Every big company is unhappy in its own particular way. eBay's environment is deadening, because the online auction site hasn't changed in five years, and it doesn't really matter; Yahoo because of the stream of talent out the door this year to hotter Valley companies; and AOL, because, in Dulles, Virginia, there are few other internet companies, and so there's nothing to do but to wait for the Time Warner unit's annual holiday cull. And that sounds the most soul-destroying of all. After the jump, a painfully depressing description of morale at the online media unit's Dulles headquarters, from an employee laid off this week.

JEFF SIMMERMON — Although my coworkers were all great, friendly people, the office got heavy and weird. "What are you hearing," we would say to each other. "Is our group safe?" Everything everyone said and implied for the last six months has had subtext and more subtext, at least in my paranoid little mind. I was fairly low on the totem pole there, and most people in my department that didn't have direct control over me could influence my boss's boss in some way — or at least I thought so. Every time a meeting happened that I wasn't invited to — regardless of the fact that I either had no business being there or didn't even want to in the first place — I thought "Christ. That's it. My input isn't valued, and I'm going to get the axe."

If I forgot to send an email, or had some items unchecked on my to-do list, or showed any other normal human sign of weakness and fallibility, I'd think "There you go. That's another brick in the wall for you, Simmermon." I rarely ate lunch away from my desk, although I highly doubt that increased presence enabled increased productivity.

Nobody ever tried to set me at ease, and nobody said it was going to be okay. I used to hold it against people, but now I get it: they didn't know either and they were just as terrified as I was.

[Drowning kittens in a river full of cash, by Jeff Simmermon]