Cracked.com has a humorous piece on the six emails you get when your company is headed towards Doomsville. While the article itself is humorous, folks at the receiving end will tend to agree it’s not funny. I’ve heard such experiences narrated to me. Heart-wrenching.

Also, did Ted up there leave for a job that seems to be way down the ladder from the one he had here? As if it was a choice between taking that or finding himself on the street because his current job was about to go away?

Also, on his last day, did he smear "SAVE YOURSELVES" on the door to his office in his own feces? [...] If somebody is touring the facility, asking about the heating system, knocking on the walls, generally getting a good idea of the place, and you’ve got no idea who they are, well, they’re the people that are going to be moving in, once your company leaves its current digs for oblivion. [...] Some of these rules may be so arbitrary that you’ll wonder if they’re intentionally trying to make your life hell. They’ve made it basically impossible to do your job and every time you break one of the long lists of arbitrary new rules, you get a written notice stuck in your file. [...] Friend, you may very well be the target of "constructive discharge." This is when a business wants to get rid of you, but doesn’t want to have to pay unemployment. So, they pressure you to quit by making it too annoying to work there.

And the piece rounds off brilliantly with:

…in some workplaces constructive discharge is difficult to implement because the harassment so closely resembles normal working conditions.