It’s time..

Well, just back from an interesting Sushi lunch invitation with some of the dwindling co-workers. It seems not only is Glen from Hawaii not to be my assistant, ever, but they are moving our entire support team from Hawaii to Santa Ana, California. The team from Hawaii came to visit with us intensely for two weeks, train and learn our operations, then went home and decided they didn’t want the responsibility. Guess those scared looks we saw in their eyes while they were training were accurate. They know as well as we did that they couldn’t replace our staff with two weeks training on these products. They know if they take the job, they’ll fail. It will all blow up in their face, and they’ve realized that’s not what they need to happen with the looming suspicion that their office is next on the chopping block. We figure its a good plan… pass the responsibility over to Santa Ana team, then when it blows up on them, Hawaii can use that to say, “Oh, perhaps we should have taken it after all. We surely could have handled it better than they did. See how much you need us now? You can get rid of us.”

Blah.. whatever. The new target date for the clearing out of this office is August 21. Let’s see what happens with that. Since the decision that an outside team can’t fully replace our staff was made, we’ve gotten authorization to hire on needed contractors to help, including the hiring of Skittles to help me. They’re also in touch with Ruksanha and Kramer to come back. Everyone is being set up to work remotely. (Everyone is being encouraged to move to Santa Ana.) Everyone can bite me. =)

I’ve learned today that the free soft drink’s in the office are no longer being restocked. We have only what’s left here, which is already out of regular Cokes. Everyone at lunch was discussing the bare minimum of work they were doing while we wait for the end to come. I’m no exception. I continue to be sent priority lists, etc etc, which I dutifully print out, so I can have the satisfaction of wadding up and tossing in the trash can. Billy is encouraging me to quit so I can come back as contractor and “make double!”, but that’s all bull. I hear most any contractor is going to get is $30 an hour. Sure that’s a few dollars more an hour than what I’m making, but not worth the hassle and insecurity of losing my health benefits, etc.

There go people trying to call me again. I love watching this phone just ring and ring and ring, little light flashing at me, “You have messages!!! Don’t you want to check them?!?” it says. No, I say. I could care less. I should change my message to say:

“The FNIS employ you’ve reached no longer gives a rat’s ass to talk to anybody else in person. Answering your phone call would probably just interrupt some serious web browsing which they were in the middle of. Leave a message, if you really don’t need anything and just enjoy talking to inanimate objects, because it will never be listened to, or if you do feel you have some important information to impart, please send an email, which will eventually be read before it is ignored. Thank you.”

Cool.. it stopped ringing. They always give up. Sweeeet.

Well, anyway, I had decided at lunch that it’s way past high time I worked on a portfolio for myself. In fact, while browsing my hard drives at home I did manage to find some offline copies of sites I’d made for Vol/IDX/Duro all those years ago. My website is a joke right now anyway, so I could stand to do something with it. After talking to Jim for a little while today, I also think I’m very interesting in finding a web developer course for certification somewhere. He begged me to kill him so he wouldn’t have to study ASP anymore, which really just makes me want to learn it.

Look! An email! I think the caller read my mind. Since they have followed my secret “how to get in touch with me” directions, I think I shall read their message after all. TTFN.

OH yeah.. remind me to look for this Dust for Life cd when I have dough.