Hire, hire, hire -- whoops, time to start firing. At Listen.com layoffs came right on the heels of steady expansion. "They kept hiring people in editorial as late as November," says one former employee. "Plus, managers were really tough about allowing people to take vacation time over the Christmas holidays. Management said, 'Look, we can't have everyone going off -- we're really gonna need you.'"

But by the Tuesday after New Year's, Listen.com execs were singing a different tune. Staffers received voice-mail messages instructing them to be at the office by 10 a.m. sharp, at which time they would receive an e-mail directing them to one of two rooms for a mandatory meeting.

"At that point," said our informant, "the jig was up." The next morning, he received an e-mail telling him to report to an inauspicious locale: the small conference room on the office's lower floor.

The news was delivered with a heavy dose of euphemistic jargon. "We were told: 'As you know, there's been a restructuring, and you have been affected by the restructuring.'" And just in case staffers hadn't quite gotten the gist, "they said, basically, 'You have 45 minutes to get out of the building.' They had boxes ready for us to pack our stuff up in."

Some staffers who were late getting back from vacation -- or just plain late -- arrived at the office to find that they couldn't get in; their key cards had been disabled. Once they got in, they discovered, along with the rest of the laid-off staffers, that their e-mail had been cut off.

The final insult came later, as the newly laid-off Listen.com staffers congregated at a bar next door. The company's CFO and CEO joined the crowd and tried to commiserate with the workers they had just laid off.

"It was the most tone-deaf move I've ever experienced. At the very least, they should have left an open tab and walked out."

You won't find this entry at Britannica.com

The week before 75 employees were laid off at Britannica.com, rumors about impending cuts were so heated that two senior vice presidents accused each other's assistants of leaking information. They hadn't.

Corporate officers tried to take control: "They decided they needed to own the rumor mill," says one editor. In a Friday afternoon meeting, a senior vice president convened staffers to dispel the rumors. He informed them that there would be some layoffs, and that they'd know by the following Thursday just how many people would be cut and who would be let go.

After dropping this bombshell, the executive turned to more pressing matters: site traffic and overall page views. Some staffers found it hard to care. "If you don't know if you're going to be there next Thursday, you don't really give a shit," said the editor.

At 4:45 p.m. on Wednesday, the editor got an e-mail announcing a 5 p.m. meeting. "We all filed downstairs and the door to the conference room was locked. We're standing outside the meeting room -- it was like a cattle call."

When the door was unlocked, 27 people filed into the room -- all, it turned out, soon-to-be laid-off employees and their supervisors. But once the meeting got underway, it took the executive in charge 12 minutes of discussing the future of the company to get to the point.

"That made me furious. I thought, either he's an idiot or he's the most insensitive person. 'Oh, I can't wait to throw myself on the funeral pyre -- at least the brand will go on!'"

Eventually, he broke the news, sort of. "Some of you will be leaving this Friday, and some of you will be leaving on Dec. 1, and you'll know when you get your package from the director of HR, who will be up here momentarily." But the human resources person was nowhere to be seen.

The executive produced a list of everyone who had been axed and proceeded to read it, with feeling, pausing between each name for somber effect. "He goes through the names and tries to look up to where the people are, but he doesn't know who's who, and he mispronounces names. It becomes really weird. You just feel like a real asshole sitting there."

By the end of the meeting, staffers still didn't know which day was to be their last. "He reads off all the names, and then we sit around there for about another five or 10 minutes for the HR person, who never comes." So some of the axed went home to their families with no idea whether they'd be at work for two and a half weeks or two days, and without a clue as to what kind of severance they'd be receiving.

As for the editor we spoke with, she spent her last two and half weeks at work looking for a new gig, with the blessing of her former bosses: "All editorial production stopped then. [Management told us:] 'Use the resources here to look for a job. We're really sorry. Finish up whatever you can. We're not expecting you to be really productive.' That was really nice."

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