Robert Cringely's column Friday spotlighted a dramatic and frightening situation for IBM employees and contractors, particularly in the US and Canada. While the actual numbers are subject to great debate, the trend is not: IBM is clearing out its Global Services division and other areas with what started out as small rounds of quiet layoffs that are now heading towards becoming thunderous in their impact.

Poughkeepsie, where I grew up and spent 23 years as a cop, is an IBM town. All of Dutchess County is pretty much an IBM town. Back in the mid nineties the Poughkeepsie and East Fishkill plants suffered 5000 layoffs in one day in a purge that almost killed the area. For over a year, it seemed that every third house on every street in Red Oaks Mill and the Spackenkill area was for sale as people headed for the hills after losing their jobs, or made plans to get out while they still could.

Surprisingly, the collapse of the county did not happen, as a huge influx of people from New York City and the the lower Westchester County region started moving in around the same time, after great improvements were made in the Metro-North train service to the City. The area stayed afloat and has even prospered, though the character of the county has been changed forever.

This is all a great oversimplification, of course, and from my own highly subjective point of view... but no one is likely to ever forget the Poughkeepsie Journal headline that simply said "5000 Fired" the day after the massacre. In a town where every family has someone employed by or closely tied to Big Blue, it was a hell of a shot.

So now it appears as though the same - or worse - may be coming, and soon. A week or two ago there was a quiet, little-noted round of fifty some-odd employees at Poughkeepsie; if you put any stock in the Cringely story - or, more tellingly, in the now over 800 comments attached to it - it appears as though a lot of people are about to get the shaft, and not just in New York. Further, it seems that time of service, job performance, any of the old work ethic criteria - none of it matters. Jobs are off to India, Vietnam, China, anywhere other than the USA.

I'm not here to argue the whole Globalization/Evil Corporation/Greedy Executive story. That's already out there and growing as this story meets the light of day in the greater media. I just think it's a damn shame in a human sense for people who have often given a great deal to their employer over the years. On the street I once lived on, over half the households suffered a direct hit in the Black Monday (I think it was Monday) layoffs. Good friends, who actually worked pretty hard at their jobs, with mortgages and children, were out in the cold just like that. Some of them are still out there. I just hate to see that storm blow in yet again.