Going Backwards

At least in point of time. The other major news is that one of the guys at work was laid off—the 10-year vet of Marketing and Sales. It was an emotional loss, to be honest: he was a "glue" guy, the sort of person you hire because he keeps things in the office together. He had an infectious sense of humor and kept people loose and ready to work. The justification for this change was that we were running a "narrow loss" and the boss felt like it was time to do things in marketing / sales differently.

To an extent I can understand this, but D's role was to implement the sales policies that E puts in place—and it just so happens that E made a substantial change to the way we sell our source code. From a user perspective, I would hate the change and wouldn't buy the source code, which heretofore has been a fairly substantial part of our business. For my part, I'd be concerned that the changes led pretty well directly to the narrow loss, and the subsequent dismissal of one of the more integral parts of the business. This has left me reading up on some books, trying to implement a few projects independently, and learning a bit about a couple new languages.

On the balance, this kind of thing doesn't unnerve me too much, although realistically I think I'd probably be the next person to go: I'm overpaid for the work that I do, I have comparatively fewer responsibilities than the others, and I tend to be the clean-up guy. This makes me somewhat more expendable. On the plus side, I have fairly substantial savings and comparatively little debt. It's been an expensive year travel-wise, so much so that I barely believed my quarter-over-quarter calculations...until I really read through things. So while I'm within tolerance, budgetary constraints will have to tighten some.

In any case, with that and the news that Mom and Dad may be moving to Santa Fe, I feel a bit more freedom to poke around at jobs. It's okay for plans to get upset—they're only there for God to reset anyway. But it has been a busy time. I have had a hard time coping with changing wake-up times and have been pretty sluggish and out of sorts the past few days. This is probably not the best way to be with a competition coming up, but que sera sera. However you spell that Frenchieness.