A "R"eally "B"rutal "I"nstitution

I'll tell you, it's a bizarre experience to watch a company that I worked within for three years slowly imploding on itself. I'm kept in the loop of what's going on there by ex-coworkers/current friends, and find it sad that the place is falling apart. (This is no current development; the place has been sliding for a while.) Recently, the division itself has been kind of merged, but not really, with the New York division; the president has resigned; people are both leaving and being escorted out of the building; the whole place seems to be heading toward the land of never never; and, oh yeah, one employee wants to buy the place for one reason: to fire everyone he works with. We used to joke that the company had become a dangerous place to work. "Like rats fleeing a sinking ship," actually, is how we described people leaving, and the company surviving. It's an interesting push and pull, emotionally, to want the company to survive for the good of the people there, but then also secretly delight in its failure, because the management is doing so much completely wrong.