There were more colleagues in the office today. Many of those who are being laid off came in to empty their desks. Some are here for the orientation sessions on how to find a job. Others are taking training to know how to fill in for us, with our new duties as web posters for our website.

Speaking of the website. Every time we looked at it today, it kept changing. The good news is that the links to all the archived programmes, and audio, are (finally!!) being restored after three days of chaos. That said, there’s still lots of work to be done.

Lots of language mixups on the new web site, and quite a few broken links on the archived site. By the way, if you’re trying to find the old site, on our new site, look for the button to the left of the LIVE RADIO (or other language equivalent) button. And of course, the live radio is not ours, it’s the live radio of our French radio at the national public broadcaster CBC/Radio-Canada. If you find it a bit weird that there’s so much publicity and links to both the English and French services of our national broadcaster, so do we.

And if you’re wondering why the news on the English and French pages of our website aren’t contextualized, you’ve probably realized if you clicked on the connect buttons, that you’re sent to our domestic national broadcaster for news. Since our newsroom is closed, and our journalists laid off, our administrators scrambled to give the impression that things are still fine, and running smoothly. They’re not.

We’re also finding that it’s hard to concentrate on the task of presenting well thought out reports and interviews. That’s because we no longer have technicians to record us in studio. Booths have been set up for us to do telephone interviews and record continuity. Even our phones have been set up for interviews, just in case. But that does take away from our main tasks.

And then there’s the website. It keeps on changing. And we’re now responsible for inputting texts, photos and audio onto the website. For some, this is their first experience. The days are stressful.

Only bright spot, seeing some of our colleagues who were laid off. But it’s a bit melancholy, they’re no longer really our colleagues. Such a waste. These people have decades of experience in explaining Canada to the world.

Another bright spot, the Washington Post has discovered us, thanks in part to that video of Marc Montgomery, host of “The LInk”. The video shows him tearfully saying goodbye to the listeners. You can see it here. This is the human part of what we do, real radio, talking to people.

So we survived Day 002 – but it’s still hard to walk by the Russian Section’s area. They’re not there. I’m wondering, will we water their plants?