which shark pointed the way?

Roaster Boy entered a comment to my story about my former company closing. I started to reply to his comment and thought it might make a good posting in itself.


Yes to good luck and good timing. I'm thinking of my husband who was recently out of work for nine months not so long ago in this same industry. I don't think my colleagues (even the one with the weird hours that get weirder when her husband is on duty ) will wait nearly so long for a good job to come along.

The reasons (we were given at least) for the shutdown are so bizarre -- they have nothing to do with the business needs or business plans. It sounds like our customer and partial investor freaked out about other parts of their business and were "cutting costs" in anticipation of what may or may not be hiccups in divisions that have nothing to do with our work.

There was of course a lot else going on that could have led to this same conclusion. In the end, perhaps it was a decision that might have been made on its own merits. We were in a very strange cycle that I fully believed we were pulling out of. However, had this decision been made for the real business reasons, I think it would have happened several months back.

That said, I can't help but wonder when we jumped the shark. Was it the nearly weekly birthday cakes we were enjoying until September? The opera singer last summer? Or all the flat screen monitors and huge game console they installed in our new space this fall? I suspect there was one shining moment for us that should have signaled we were on the way down.

Actually, our move into the new space -- the new shiny, modern, architect-designed space with giant offices and tiny cubes, complete with lounge chairs on wheels, padded filing cabinets that could be used as guest seats, and motion-activated lighting in the conference rooms -- seemed to coincide with slamming into the first rock in the road. I think the rock was there, but the collision didn't happen until the move.

RB pointed to an aspect other than business plans that could have been vetted, and I will leave those conclusions to the imagination of the reader. I'm sure we will be discussing this for a long time to come.