[sound of crickets chirping]

Normally, even in my 48 square foot gulag, I can hear the activity on the rest of the floor. Phones ringing, people talking, signs of life. This afternoon, it seemed very quiet out on the floor while I was taking call after call. I stood up to look over the partition and it was like a ghost town. Most of the cubes were empty.

This is a direct result of the decision to cut hours after finally getting up to proper staffing levels. For the day I took 40% more calls than the next most productive person on the floor.

I hear that the Site Manager argued long and hard to keep staffing levels up to where they should be but he was inevitably overruled by the Corporate Overlord's Bean Counters. So, all the work I did over the summer training a score of new people is being eroded by the bottom line.