If you treat your peaple like replaceable cogs
they  will become replaceable cogs.




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                      Escape From New Jersey



Having just done a layoff two  weeks before - after having done two
(permanent) workforce  reductions already  this year  - we  are now
going to be  doing furloughs of 2  days per month (i.e.,  a 10% pay
cut).

No  you may  not use  PTO  to cover  the time.  Please update  your
programs, as the saying goes.


This is beginning  to feel a lot like a  death-march, even though I
think that is really more of a programming industry term.


...


No, actually  instead I  was terminated  that Wednesday  evening (a
couple months  of Wednesdays  ago) at  4:45pm -  with a  drive home
through  tornado  warnings,  flood warnings,  a  sloppy,  dangerous
voyage through  the remnants  of Hurricane  Ida tearing  up eastern
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and really savaging New York. Fortunately
I just had to escape Jersey. Getting my termination done earlier in
the day just  wasn't a priority I suppose, though  my boss only had
to be in the room for about one minute, leaving the HR Director and
Security Director to handle things.

(They terminated the  HR Director not long after that  as she's now
looking for a job as well. Hey, no furloughs.)

I packed up my office  things, mementoes from past jobs, notebooks,
reference books,  and the like, all  under the eye of  the Security
Director (just policy, not surprising, and we'd worked together and
I liked working with him). He helped me get the boxes into my truck
in the pouring rain and said goodbye  and I got on the road back to
PA. The  roads were already  getting to be  a mess and  traffic was
getting stupid so I just resolved  to take it easy, not think about
work, let the numbness continue and not think about the future just
yet. I  had to turn back  from one route, flooding  was already too
bad, re-routed back to I-78 that I was hoping to avoid. Fortunately
driving a  big, very visible white  truck helps with merging  and I
got into  the flow  of interstate traffic  okay, the  entrance ramp
being low it  was full of water  but we powered on through  it - no
other choice  by the  time you could  see it. I  then had  to avoid
semi's not holding their lanes very  well in the wind, crawling and
crawling along, and  other drivers not watching the  road. Not much
tailgating fortunately and a few hours  later I made it to my exit,
bladder screaming  by this time, plunged  through another exit-ramp
pond through sheer  momentum and made it to the  Wawa station and a
restroom. Fifteen  more minutes and home  to tell my wife  the crap
news - she took  it well - and then dragging the  wet boxes of work
stuff inside and upstairs. Done.


Obviously it  was time for  me to begin looking  for a new  gig but
they certainly could  have shown a little  professionalism about it
and yet they did not. It had  been made clear to me over the course
of two  years there  that I  would not be  permitted to  support my
people when  it got  in the  way of them  being used  as convenient
scapegoats for  the engineering and production  folks wholly unable
to  do their  jobs even  adequately. It  was time  to move  on. The
simple truth is that there are significant profits to be made there
without  huge investments  but  it would  require  major changes  -
mostly in  how leadership is  done -  and the 'leaders'  just can't
face that.


I suppose  I just should have  known better than to  even interview
for a job in fucking New  Jersey, but I was getting desperate while
managing the shutdown of the last  company I worked for. There were
times that I  pondered that maybe it was  merely a money-laundering
operation  for some  organized  crime outfit,  then abandoned  that
hypothesis - no  mob-run organization would ever let  its books get
bad enough for their bank to get directly involved in things.

I had promised myself that I wouldn't stay until the bitter end for
another company when it began to  be obvious that things were going
south. Turns out I didn't have to at least.


For those  left behind it is  probably a death-march now.  They are
truly struggling  to get  enough weekly shipments  out the  door to
keep the  bank that holds their  debts from bringing in  someone to
run  the company  directly  for  them (as  an  alternative to  just
calling in their debts - they  apparently owe too much for the bank
to just give  up and shut them  down). As the old  saying goes: you
can't cut your way to profitability, but they have been trying. I'm
sure the bank  folks are pushing that line because  they don't know
anything about running an actual company.

I'm not happy  to be out of a  job but glad to no  longer be facing
one untenable or potentially unethical situation after another.






A man who  procrastinates in his choosing will  inevitably have his
choice made for him by circumstance.
(Hunter S. Thompson)



                    NO CARRIER