Nothing sets the office rumor mill going like a layoff. Everyone's jockeying for position and looking for information; no one actually works in the runup to a corporate cull. Here are some of the things I heard in the aftermath of last week's layoffs at Yahoo:

• At one Yahoo office in southern California, 20 out of 50 employees on a single floor had their mail slots removed from the mailroom and placed on top of a bookcase — a week before the layoffs. "Talk about forewarnings," a Yahoo wrote us. "I thought yahoo had more class than that. I had worked at AOL for many years and they were not as bad as that."
• A host of small projects launched right before the scheduled layoffs — suggesting that their creators were worried they'd get laid off and the projects would never see the light of day if they didn't rush them out.
• Saddest note from a Yahoo: "I am currently with Yahoo as QA Lead and looking for opportunities with Valleywag. PFA my resume herewith. I can be reached at 408-XXX-XXXX."
• Yahoo aid off a bunch of people who had just finished training their replacements in India. A sensible business move, and yet oh so Dilbert.
• From a fired Yahoo up north:
  

  I got laid off in the Canadian office a couple of months ago. The idiot HR person followed the script you leaked to the letter.

  Here's some background:
  - My manager went on mat-leave.
  - Her temporary replacement was THE stereotypically awful manager: ignorant, mean, interested only in kissing the CEO's ass by slagging everyone who reported to her, and proposing ridiculous changes to a set of processes that the particular teams had established over three years of development and constant success (really: this particular team was the only team in the entire Canadian and European collection of offices that had this level of success).

  - I was the senior member of the team, and I had been at the company longer than this temp-replacement, so we butted heads.

  - The temp-replacement was close friends with the brand new HR manager.
  - The temp-replacement and her HR friend gave me a disciplinary letter, in which they flat-out lied, claiming that co-workers had said things about my performance that they hadn't. When those co-workers found out, they complained to HR, and my letter was suddenly taken back.

  - After a few months of clashing with the temp-manager, and a few months before the mat-leave was to end, I got the layoff-speech.

  - The temp-manager made sure to re-org (another typical yahoo move), and give herself a new managerial role, so that when the mat-leave does end, that person now reports to the person who was her temp-replacement.

• And from Southeast Asia, word comes that people had access to Yahoo's Backyard intranet a day before the layoffs. That also happened in the U.S. in February's layoffs.
• The leaked layoff instructions we ran proved helpful:
  

  I too received the tell-tale call yesterday, December 9th. It's interesting how the script was posted on valleywag.com, since that is EXACTLY what my manager said to me. LOL! I too find it interesting that the position I was hired for was being cut due to "reduction is workforce" and yet that very same position is currently posted on Hotjobs (which is a part of Yahoo). One would think that if Yahoo is truly making a reduction in their workforce then why would they have a post for the same position which they just laid you off from?

• Worst reporting on the layoffs: Dawn Kawamoto's breathless piece in CNET News, which reported a "twist" in Yahoo's severance package. The "twist"? Yahoo's 1,500-some laid-off employees would stay on the payroll through mid-February. However, that's not an exciting new severance program; it's simply Yahoo complying with a federal labor law called the WARN Act, which requires 60 days' warning to employees affected by a mass layoff.
• A tipster at Brickhouse, Yahoo's San Francisco "incubator" office, reports that layoff plans were clear a day ahead of schedule:
  

  Moving boxes showed up to at the Brick on Tuesday night. if you've ever been to the Brick, you know that there's no receptionist and no way to hide them. Very classy, Sunnyvale, "Don't let the door hit you..."

Dickerson, his successor, was a solid if stolid executive best known for greasing the sticky wheels of Yahoo's bureaucracy. He has been replaced by someone even more unremarkable. Brickhouse was Yahoo's corporate version of an attention whore, an object we pay attention to because it demands we pay attention to it. I wouldn't be surprised if it's shuttered soon. If it is, will we even notice? (Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

Will Slingshot actually produce anything besides cushier jobs for restless talent at MySpace? Yahoo's Brickhouse is a cautionary tale. The San Francisco office was meant to house creative new projects — like Flickr, but built in-house. In practice, however, it's nearly impossible to pay employees as richly as the startup stock-option lottery does. A sinecure at a big company is less risky, and less rewarding. Will the likes of Granado produce a big payoff for MySpace? Unlikely. But it must be worth something to put studs out to pasture, rather than see them running with the herd at Facebook.

Cook, typically a verbose sort online, hasn't mentioned anything about his new job on Twitter or any of his other frequent outlets. Could he be abashed about his new assignment? Yahoo is no one's employer of choice in the Valley these days. But given his noisy departure from Twitter, it's not likely he had many options. And neither did Yahoo.

Valleywag hears that for this and other projects, engineers have been flown in from around the world to finish the project; people on the verge of walking out have been cajoled to stay; and people who have already quit have been asked to come back as contractors. Which would seem to go against the goal of controlling headcount, trimming costs, and focusing on core projects. But expecting Yahoo to stick to a strategy seems a bit much.

Next time, throw paper. According to the World RPS society, it's got a 3.73 percent advantage over rock or scissors.

Gatz has been mum. But likely as not, Gatz may have gotten sick of working withSalim Ismail, the publicity-hungry Silicon Valley Tool charged with Brickhouse, the sexier part of Horowitz's innovation empire. Either that, or Gatz is just eager to spend more time nerdspotting for Valleywag. Scott, we have an opening for a party correspondent, if you haven't heard.

Ismail told BusinessWeek that Fire Eagle took three months to develop, "65 percent" faster than similar Yahoo projects. Sweet if it were true. A prototype version of Fire Eagle was already out in June. Which means that if the Fire Eagle team actually meets Ismail's made-up release deadline for the end of November, he'll only have have mislead the magazine by half. In other words, Fire Eagle's engineers won't have to miss that deadline to make a liar out of Ismail. He's already saved them the trouble.

(Photo by Timothy Archibald/BusinessWeek)

• Om Malik's Internet video blog, NewTeeVee, hosts its NewTeeVee Live conference today in Mission Bay, south of the ballpark. Not interested in talking business with videobloggers? Check out the game show tonight at 7 p.m., where contestants including Diggnation drinker Kevin Rose and Wallstrip siren Lindsay Campbell will compete in a Family Feud style contest hosted by comedienne Heather Gold. [NewTeeVee]
• Lotus founder Mitch Kapor gives a talk today at 4 p.m. at UC Berkeley's School of information. [UC Berkeley]
• Nate Bolt, CEO of Bolt Peters, gives at talk at Yahoo Brickhouse about UX research with an emphasis about life instead of just interfaces. I don't know what the hell that means either, but it's a chance to test morale at the Brickhouse. [Upcoming]

Tom Coates, the London-based Yahoo who's actually running Fire Eagle, had been quietly talking it up among people interested in the project, which aims to make it easier for people to broadcast their locations across various websites. But when Ismail decided to make a big announcement and brief the Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch, Coates's name was nowhere to be seen. What's worse, his engineering team was still working on it and the project, which Ismail said would launch by the end of the month, wasn't ready to go live.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a clever exercise of the classic software-company management trick: Boss preannounces project in order to spur programmers to actually ship code. But Coates was irate enough to force Ismail to backpedal on his blog:

Lots of coverage, mostly good. However, it's important to note that it's just an announcement. The developer launch will happen later this month. Tom Coates and the team have been working tirelessly with some of the world's leading geo-coding experts, and we're almost ready.

Brickhouse, an inspiring idea, is at once an object of envy and ridicule within Yahoo. With few successful projects coming out of the San Francisco incubator, Ismail's boss, Bradley Horowitz, have been trying to extend the brand to efforts housed in Yahoo's R&D labs and its Advanced Products Group. That, of course, will end up drawing more attention to the San Francisco group's failures.

What really makes Ismail a Silicon Valley Tool? Horowitz is using him. Ismail and Brickhouse are being set up to fail. If Brickhouse has another success like Pipes, expect Horowitz to take credit. And if Brickhouse flops for good? Ismail gets the blame. One almost feels sorry for him.

Ismail's plight wouldn't matter, of course, except for this: While the purple people play political games over who should get the most points for innovation, Google and Facebook are actually inventing useful new software. Maybe people at Yahoo are, too — but thanks to bosses who can't even steal credit successfully, you'll never hear about it.