Community Chat

[kittymomNC]

On 4/2/2014 terrier3 said:

As I have posted before...my office got new managers about 2 years ago. We had no idea that they were there to get rid of everyone with pensions and seniority in preparation for a big sale of the company.

Little by little, each and EVERY person in the office started having panic attacks - men & women.

Sometimes I would go in the ladies room and 3 people would be in there, crying or getting sick to their stomachs.

Finally I came to the realization that life is too short to be so miserable. I know it was affecting my physical health...I had that constant "fight or flight" adrenaline rush feeling Sunday afternoon through Friday at 5PM. My assistant had digestive problems 24/7...her doctor told her, after many tests, it was stress.

I left in November...since then 10 of my 12 co-workers have left...and one of those remaining guys is retiring in May.

I understand that totally. I started having them when my company had been bought out and was downsizing. I was in Human Resources and kept having more and more work and responsibility dumped on me. I don't know how many on here are familiar with or remember Affirmative Action Plans, but I took on that responsibility for my company, which entailed doing three separate AAPlans. They were very detailed and complicated to do--the person who had done them before had not kept up with them and I had to totally redo everything at the same time I was learning it, and right in the middle, we were notified we were going to have a government audit (they could audit your AAPlans any time they wanted). That was when I started having the panic attacks. I also had retinal migraines, (losing peripheral vision, then headache), and one afternoon in the middle of an audit session, I had one of those.

About a year later, the company offered a very good voluntary termination package, and I was out of there! I never went back into the corporate world - I started my own jewelry business! The panic attacks went away........