Today marks my anniversary date at Diamond Comic Distributors. Eighteen years. Started on May 17, 2007.
Yesterday, a number of people I work with were let go due to Diamond’s bankruptcy.
I’d seen the news that the sale—Ad Populum, the owners of Graceland, had bought Diamond’s assets—on Facebook. I read the press release, and there was something obvious that was missing like the dog who did not bark in the night.
Fifteen minutes later, I received a text that one of the graphic designers on the PREVIEWS team was let go. Then one of the Brand Managers–Diamond’s term for a buyer in the Purchasing department—called me to see if I’d been let go. I hadn’t, as far as I knew, and was working on his catalog section for the July PREVIEWS when he called. As we were talking—this conversation lasted twenty minutes, an unimportant detail except that my neighbor’s autistic son heard that I was talking to someone and this was very important to him—I received an email from someone in another department, letting me know that he’d been let go. (His identity isn’t secret, he’s talked about this on LinkedIn, but it’s not my story to tell.) “I don’t feel like doing much of anything now,” said my friend the Brand Manager. I had to agree.
I sat outside for a little bit, talking to my neighbor’s son. A storm rolled in, and it began to rain and thunder. I saw the article on Comics Beat that Chris Powell had been one of the losses at Diamond. My neighbor came outside to smoke some medical marijuana—at times I think I’m the only person in my building who doesn’t smoke (it’s not legal in Pennsylvania, btw)—and went back inside. Then, over the next few hours, I fielded messages from colleagues, former and current, and people in the industry that I know, asking how I was, if I were still employed (as far as I know!), if I knew who hadn’t made the cut,
I put a baseball game on the radio and returned to working on the PREVIEWS catalog copy about 7 o’clock. I could have left it for Monday, but Monday will almost certainly be a day of sifting through the rubble, picking up the pieces, and figuring out where things go from here. I wrapped work on the section about 8:30 and emailed the text to the Brand Manager. Then, I treated myself to the cheesecake I’d bought at the grocery store. I don’t know what prompted me to buy it, except a feeling that, with everything going on in the world and at work, that I deserved it.
I did not regret the purchase. I regretted that I hadn’t bought more.
The survivor’s guilt in me right now is strong.
I keep thinking back to April of 2020 (I told the story here, but it’s worth retelling.)
On April 9, Chris Powell sent me an email and asked me to give him a call. I did. It was raining heavily. I had the front door to my apartment open—I just have a door, no storm door—and I leaned against the frame, watching the rain fall as he told me about “The Plan”: Diamond would be laying everyone off but a small skeleton crew due to COVID.
“I don’t know exactly what you do,” Chris said, “but we feel it’s essential, that we need you, and we would like you to say. But I have to give you the option to take the furlough, because with the unemployment bonus you’ll make more money.”
I didn’t even have to think. “I’m in,” I said.
And we talked for ten minutes about how this was temporary, how everyone would be back in the office by Memorial Day, and how I couldn’t tell anyone. The intention had been for the layoffs to happen the following day. They were postponed by a week, I never knew (or cared) why. For a week, I had to deal with people, some of them friends that I truly cared about, that I knew were getting laid off imminently. There was an email thread with Jim Fallone, the director of Purchasing, where we were strategizing the production on the June 2020 PREVIEWS, the one we would do with the skeleton crew, and when I learned that Jim had been one of those laid off I felt absolutely terrible.
I had such survivor’s guilt. It lingered. Working out of the office a few times a week as I did didn’t help, seeing the cubicles sitting empty… and eventually boxed up and emptied out, especially in the Customer Service area. “The Dead Zone,” I called it.
Sometime in late summer or early fall of 2020, I was in the Wawa across the street from the office buying lunch. I saw Dave Thomas, who worked in Customer Service. He was impossible to miss, with his great gray beard. He often traveled with a guitar. He took the Light Rail, and there were mornings that I’d see him walking down York Road—Diamond’s offices were not close to the Light Rail stop—and I’d pull into a parking lot and give him a lift to the office the rest of the way. Suffice it to say, I was so excited to see him. “Dave! How are you doing!” He must have been in the office that day, if I was seeing him across the street.
“They fired me!” he said with such vehemence that all I could do was go, “Oh.” The survivor’s guilt took hold of me once more. Or maybe it had never left me at all.
In the years since then, a few of my colleagues said to me, “I’m watching you. When you jump, I’ll jump.” I kept my eyes open, looking for signs that Diamond was in trouble. First we lost DC Comics. Then Marvel. Dark Horse and IDW. Image Comics jumped ship. PRH bought BOOM! Studios. Rosy spins were put on all of these losses, and while I knew there was some truth to them–DC and Marvel, especially, were not profit centers for the company; we made little money on these, despite their volume–at some point it was sure to break. Through all of this, I kept looking for moves to react, changes to compensate, to shore up the business. None ever came, until that January day that Diamond announced it was filing for bankruptcy.
Twenty years ago, I worked for EB Games. In 2005, GameStop announced they were buying EB. That we were for sale wasn’t a surprise to me; in 2001, Mr. Kim, our founder and majority owner, said he had, and this is an exact quote, seared into memory, “no emotional attachment” to his EB stock. The day after the sale closed, in February 2006, GameStop fired half of EB’s district managers and regionals. Some of them, people I’d known. We called it “Black Tuesday.” A few years later, at Diamond, I worked with a Brand Manager, Jesse Morgan, who had been a GameStop store manager at the same time, and we’d sometimes trade war stories.
The last day of my seventeenth year was Diamond’s “Black Friday.” Good people lost their jobs yesterday. The first day of my eighteenth is a new chapter, a new company, new directions, and maybe new opportunties. I don’t know what the future holds. I do know it will be built on the ashes of yesterday.
I sat with my survivor’s guilt last night. I’m sitting with the guilt today.