Gargantua is a company that learns from its mistakes. When it fired the one hundred person US support group, it almost immediately faced the embarrassment of trying to rehire them. The foreign replacement workforce was not up to snuff. Gargantua scrambled to fix this problem by recalling the freshly terminated workers. Further embarrassment came when half of the fired workers refused the offer to return. When it was time for Gargantua to get rid of us, the company wanted to avoid making the same mistake twice in row.

We were not escorted from the building. We were given our notice and required to work it out. Gargantua knew that pink slipped employees do not make the best customer service agents, so they protected themselves from any possible performance failure.  Gargantua simply flipped a switch on the network and all our call traffic was sent overseas. The replacement team was instantly busy. We were made to sit by our silent phones, endlessly waiting for calls that never arrived. Our team was now a safety feature. A back-up work group. If our replacements proved unable to handle the traffic, the switch would be thrown back to the original position and our phones would instantly light up. But the phones never lit up. They remained silent. We remained patiently waiting for Godot to phone in with a server problem. But he never called.

Gargantua planned this workforce transition very well. I cannot remember much from that period apart from the fact that it was extremely quiet, and very dull, and I had to constantly fight to stay awake. At the time I thought this was due to boredom. I now suspect this desire for sleep was due to the injury. I slept a great deal during this period. I would arrive home completely exhausted and immediately fall into a deep sleep, waking in time to grab some food, and head back into work.

The key aspect of this changed  work environment was the lack of challenge, the absence of any demand to perform. My work life became a vacuum and this vacuum was encountered the day after the accident. If the work routine had remained unchanged, with our normal call volume, and the always demanding customers, I am certain I would have encountered difficulties. These would have triggered an awareness of the injury and likely have resulted in my seeking medical attention. And, even if I had failed to notice the deficits, I am confident that the work place monitoring regime would have detected the fall off in performance, and called me to account. But there was no work. There were no more calls. The nights crawled by, the days were spent in heavy deep sleep, and I was completely unaware of any injury impacts.

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This text is part of a longer creation. I am still responding to the events of the teleconference. I know that writing calms me, gives me a sense of control. I have been working away as a means to temper, or mitigate, or avoid, a depressive event. So far, so good.

Today, I also took the bike out. My left arm gave me trouble after about 30 minutes. The entire trip was about 3 hours in length.

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At the time of the accident, my co-workers cautioned me on the dangers of whiplash injury. I researched this on the web and found information regarding soft tissue injuries (I had a few of these, nothing serious). The basic guidance was to get lots of rest. This is exactly what I proceeded to do but I failed to associate my tiredness with brain injury. I knew very little of brain injury apart from my prior experience in search and rescue. I was not even aware that a closed head injury was possible.

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The prior post on Gargantua may be found here.