Silver lining in the Coronavirus cloud →[More:]
As some of you know, my employers have been trying for a couple of years to persuade a bunch of us - all senior technical staff with years of specialist knowledge and experience - to accept voluntary redundancy. Every time the deadline for us to leave approached, it would be extended by another three or six months, because without us, there is nobody to do the complex work and TPTB realised they couldn't manage without us.

We were finally meant to be finishing our current roles in June, after which those of us who didn't want to leave would be moved to a new area, doing largely down-graded, low-value work for which our skills would not be needed. This is in the hope that we would decide to leave rather than take these other jobs.

We were told today that, given the current situation, we will be continuing in our present roles for another year.

Now all I have to do is survive the virus...