I meant to share with you that my husband's employer, Barge, Waggoner, Sumner and Cannon engineers, laid off 10% of their Knoxville workforce last Friday. Barge employs around 80 locally.

My husband was spared, but as a single-income family, it was quite unnerving for us. The woman who had sat next to my husband for 15 years was let go. The office receptionist, who had been with the firm for 25 years, also lost her job. This second woman, who has two children, had also lost everything she owned in a house fire a couple of years back.

Until this year, we had never seen Barge lay off employees in the entire 15 years my husband has worked there. Friday's layoffs, though, were the second round in recent months. An earlier reduction some months back caused just two or three locals to lose their jobs.