A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

My company brought on consultants. They were having us do the absolute strangest things. Pointless meetings. Duplicating infrastructure. Documenting processes so deeply entrenched in what we did they'd never be forgotten. Then they hired another small team that did basically the same things we did on a much smaller scale.

Then my department got sold to another company, and it all made sense.

Looking back it's pretty obvious that they were bifurcating while duplicating important infrastructure. At the time going through it though I just thought the consultants were total morons, not understanding the business and that we'd be doing twice the work by having two of everything.

They sold it to us while it was happening that we were the domestic team and they were the "global" team, and we bought it as a concept, but we all thought it was a stupid distraction. We were absolutely certain we'd be merging our departments within a couple years.

Finding out that they had been actively lying to us about what was going on for almost a year really... Changed how I thought about companies. They had been lying to my face every single day for a very long time, that really violated my trust.