Is it Day 3? Or is it Day 4? Already, it’s becoming a blur.

Like a hamster trapped on a treadmill, with no beginning and no end. Like a factory worker on an assembly line constantly trying to make sure the bolt fits, as another bolt has to be attached. We charge ahead, determined to fill our quota. Determined to prove we’re professionals. Determined to do the best we can for the listeners we’ve left behind on radio, who might still be trying to hear us on our website. Are they? And what about those who no longer have access to our reports and interviews? Will they wait for us to come back? Will they give up on us?

There’s not much time to reflect these days at Radio Canada International. We all have been given quotas for the number of reports and interviews we’re to produce each week. One lone technician is with us, for just this week, to help us figure out how to record our interviews in newly re-designed booths so that there’s no need to have the services of the five technicians that used to work with us.

Meanwhile the “easy” work of finding a photo, copy-pasting a web-link, writing an introduction for the website, that was supposed to take only a few minutes takes a lot longer. For many colleagues this is their first time. It’s sometimes embarrassing. After years of being a radio professional. Of feeling like a professional. It’s grade one, all over again. And having to ask our webmasters, and other colleagues how to do the most basic things. They seem like mountains, but supposedly this is so easy.

With all these extra tasks, there’s less time to concentrate on researching the subjects we’re covering. Less time to talk to our interviewees. Not enough time to get in that last question, because another colleague is waiting outside the booth, desperate to start their interview.

We got a memo Wednesday. That was Day 3, right? And it says they’re going to move us. With just under 20 people, it’s a shame for all this space to go to waste after three-quarters of our colleagues were laid off.

Go to go. Have to work on another report.

What can you do to help us? http://rciaction.org/blog/what-you-can-do/

Is this how the end looks? One step at a time, Radio Canada International continues to be dismantled. This used to be where the technician sat, the controls in front of him, to record our telephone interviews. A new memo says we'll be moving soon. Guess we're taking up to much space, after all the layoffs.