Here today, gone tomorrow

So the phone rings at approximately 8 AM on Sunday morning - December 6th, 2009. It's my boss and he say's that he's got bad news. He proceeds to inform me that there is a good chance the company is closing down and that there is going to be a conference call at 2:30 AM Monday morning - a full 18 hours later! What a terrific way to start the day.

After spending the entire day worrying about what I would do if the news were to indeed be true, I suddenly found myself in a situation that many other Americans found themselves in as of late: unemployment. Its something that I had been lucky enough to escape until now. I tried hard to not get caught up in the whirlwind of panic and hysteria. How was I going to make the house payment? Who's going to pay for the cars, the student loans, the bills, food, this, that, ugh!

Fast forward to 2:29 AM, I got an email saying the meeting was delayed an extra hour. "Great!" I think to myself, could this get any better?

3:30 rolls around, after a few more rounds of Team Fortress 2 online - hey what else was I going to do? Sleep? So I dial in the conference line and it is what we had all feared: the company had decided to fire (although I like the term terminate better) everyone - effective immediately. So much for hope right?

What had happened was the investors couldn't come to agreement with how much money they were going to make / loose, so they felt it was in their best interest to shut the company down and try to sell the intellectual property. A great idea for them, a bad situation for us.

You see the tricky part about working for an Israeli-based company was that since they're so far away its hard to knock on anyone's door to demand back-pay. I was technically employed by Administaff, a US-based company, who quickly covered their own hide and severed any ties they had with Exanet and the US-based employees. I had vacation days, regular pay, expenses, commission all owed to me with nobody to stick the bill to. To top it off, this was three weeks before Christmas which made things even more stressful.

Next up: The rest of the saga...

Economy Woes

It seems like everyday we hear that more and more companies are laying off workers. Just today, I saw that Dow Chemical was laying off 5,000 workers - sheesh! That's a lot of workers. I guess it is times like these, times when the entire global economy goes right into the toilet, that things get tight. Budgets shrink, spending decreases, demand decreases, sales drop and businesses find that things need to change in order for them to survive.

I think that during these times, if one finds himself still employed, despite all that is going on around the world - he or she should consider themselves, very fortunate. As you may have guessed, each day the job market not only gets worse, but the competition gets fiercer and finding a job can be extremely challenging.

What can you do during these times you may ask, for one, create a profile on social networking sites such as Linked In. On Linked In, you can connect with co-workers, ex-co-workers, business partners and colleagues. It makes staying in touch simpler, than before and its a great way to network with peers. Of course the other nice thing about it is, if you do happen to find yourself in need of a job, it isn't too difficult to send some emails to some people that you know and see if they are hiring. You can also ask for introductions if they know someone that you haven't meet before.

So go, now is the time to CYA!

If Linux is so superior...

Then why is it easier in Windows to view system events, sort, filter and comprehend what is going wrong. Unlike Linux, where you have to watch the system in real-time, filter out for specific words and try to read the text like you're Neo from the Matrix?!

1st Blog Evar!

Hello world!

This is my first blog entry, I thought'd I'd share it with you.

Regards,
JP