I'm so glad...

Just the other day, I was talking to a friend whose company is undergoing a re-organization. 

His firm - knock on formica - is doing well, so it's not going to be one of those blood-letting re-orgs. And it's not one of those (shudder) financial restructuring kind of re-orgs.

It's just a good, old-fashioned, ya-got-ya-winners, ya-got-ya-losers kind of re-org.  The kind that are often mistaken for de-orgs.

From what little he told me, the re-org sounds like it has its stu-dip elements, that's for sure. Don't they all.

I have to say, hearing about the re-org he's currently enduring, I am not one bit nostalgic for the reorganizations of my career.

Some were one-person re-orgs: I was the one re-org'd out of one existence and into another. Like the time my (female) boss told me that she didn't like having women report to her, so I became the only person on her team in a totem pole relationship. I got to report to one of the cute guys that "Annie" had proudly told me she had in her group. I had landed in Annie's lap to begin with as part of a mega-reorganization that clobbered my subdivision, let more than a couple of pints of blood, and sucked the survivors up into the main, HQ part of the company.

This was one of several personal re-orgs I lived through. In some I won - plucked from obscurity to assume a higher role. In others (fortunately less often), I lost, and found myself staring up at someone who'd been my peer just a few minutes before.

Whatever the direction, after I few I stopped taking personal re-orgs so personally.

Then there were the major reshuffles, that may have made sense on paper but never seemed to in reality.

Or the ones that didn't really change something, other than names in the boxes on the org chart.

Sure, sometime the re-orgs meant shifting alliances a bit and/or giving someone an always temporarily power edge.

Most of them reminded me of the days in grammar school when they changed the seating arrangement, and we had to pick up our books, pencils, and Milton Bradley water color set and move a couple of rows over and a couple of desks down. Okay, Sister, we're now in our places with bright shiny faces, what now? (At least in grammar school there was something to say for the mild change of scenery. You really could get bored looking at the back of the same kid's head for months at a time.

But for those time when you could see a re-org coming, I always hated the run-ups to them, the speculation, the gossip, the fear-factor. Then there was the shock and awe, the after the fact sorting out.

Who's up? Who's down? Who's in? Who's out?

I'm dee-lighted to be able to say that, after all these years, who cares?

Not having to deal with re-orgs is one of the aspects of self-employment that truly gladdens my heart.