When I was working for Harcourt College, our parent company decided to put all of Harcourt’s publishing divisions up for sale. It took a long time, with several half-hearted inquiries, but eventually a suitor came along and snapped up the business. Thomson Learning, the 3rd largest textbook publisher, leapfrogged ahead of McGraw-Hill into 2nd place with the acquisition. However, due to potential regulatory issues they spun off several of the other business units to Reed Elsevier.
So after some high-level meetings between Thompson and Harcourt College, they sent a delegation for a series of meetings in Fort Worth, culminating in an appearance at our monthly company meeting.
As I walked into the meeting room that morning, I’d noticed a couple of our senior managers were looking pretty grumpy. I didn’t think anything of it, since those two were often grumpy. Anyway, we had as part of our presentation to our Thompson visitors a “welcome to Fort Worth” cake.
The Thompson folks setup a Powerpoint introduction of their company, the various locations, and people.
Oh, and the last slide informed everyone they were shutting us down in six months.
The HR folks quickly wheeled out the cake after that.
I never saw what happened to it, but allegedly it ended up in the main break room impaled by several branded letter openers.
And a couple hundred people got cast into the job market, just in time to catch the post 9/11 recession.