Category: Job Experiences

1992/2006

In 1992, I worked for a company called GeoVision. I’d worked there for 6 years, but they were having financial problems. The previous two quarters, the end of the quarter had been the time when they announced layoffs. And just like the previous two end of quarters, the bean counters from both the Ottawa and Denver offices were huddled together the day before, and this time they came around with a list and told everybody whether they had to go to the 2pm meeting or the 3pm meeting. I was invited to the 2pm meeting. It turned out that everybody invited to the 2pm meeting was laid off, and the 3pm meeting was to announce that they’d had to do this to ensure the continued health of the company (it didn’t work – 6 months later they were out of business).

Now flash forward to 2006. I’m on a contract at $EMPLOYER. I’ve been there for 4.5 years on this contract, and I was in a previous contract in the same office for 3 years. $EMPLOYER, as everybody knows, has been shrinking for decades. And they announced that our group (Entertainment Imaging) has to shrink by 10% (they’ve offerred the voluntary retirement package (called “getting tapped”) to certain eligible job categories, then next year if they haven’t met their targets they’ll fire some people) and also it’s becoming part of the Film Products Group (which really inspires confidence that our digital project is going to be a high priority). And then today, just to make my heart rate soar, they announced that there are problems extending our contracts, and the boss set up a series of meeting to “talk with each of you on Friday regarding our decision to extend your contract or not for 2007”. And I got one of the early ones.

Can you tell I’m not going to sleep well tonight?

Ever been so tired and overstressed you can’t sleep?

I’ve been exhausted for days now – I feel like I can’t keep my eyes open. It’s accumulated lack of sleep and stress from this project I’m on – I’ve put in over 55 hours a week for about 2 months now.

Last night I went to bed early to try and get some rest. But I found myself lying in bed awake in the middle of the night, worrying that if I didn’t get back to sleep soon I’d been even more tired and wouldn’t be able to finish the work I promised to get finished by Monday.

Believe me, that’s not conducive to getting back to sleep. It’s a great cycle of stress leading to lack of sleep leading to stress.

I want my weekends back. Although the first weekend I get off after this project is done will probably be spent comatose.

More of the same.

Still muddling along on the project mentioned in Rants and Revelations » Stress, stress, and more stress. My boss wants my bit to be test-able and demo-able by the first of the month, and I’m not sure I can do it. I don’t think the other bits are going any better. The Chinese team have delivered something, but we can’t test it yet until my bit and Tony’s bit are finished. Kris is working on a bit that we were going to farm out to the Chinese team, but we decided it would be faster for him to do it than to try to explain it to them. It seems that in order specify the requirement in sufficent detail that you could just hand it over to a foreign team, you need a formal language. And the formal language we know best and can produce fastest is Java.

In added aggravation, just as I was turning into the parking lot at work this morning, my muffler started dragging on the ground. A quick examination seemed to indicate it was just the strap hangar broke, which is exactly what it turned out to be. Cheap, but time-consuming and annoying.

Meanwhile, the peridontist is going to be fixing my front teeth this Saturday. He says they have to make an incision in the front of my jaw, scrape out crud, and put in something to make the bone grow back. He says I won’t be able to “incise” for a couple of weeks.

Saturday is also the day when we have our MoveOn.org Call For Change party. I have a bit of a mental block against making phone calls to strangers thanks to an incident from my childhood, but maybe I can just play host.

On Monday, my 1U server goes off to the colo. I just got the network settings, so sometime on Sunday I have to take down the server and set up the networking.