(Tap tap tap) Uh… hello? (insert microphone screech here) Anybody out there? It’s um… me.

Have I successfully chased away the 4 readers I spent years accumulating? Probably. You know that phrase “Silence is Golden”? I think in blog-land it’s more like “Silence is Deadly.”

I needed the break though. It’s been nice to be relatively disconnected from the computer for a month.

Hopefully I’ll get the chance to catch up a bit now but my inlaws have been staying with us since the middle of the month and are here until next Monday and they don’t know about this blog. So I don’t do lot of blogging while they’re around to avoid raising suspicions.

So where did I leave off? Oh yeah. I got laid off.

I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. But I can say that the timing took me by surprise. My little company had not had a profitable month in almost a year. The boss’ enthusiasm had dwindled due to outside stresses in his life (among other things, having 3 close family members diagnosed and/or die of cancer within a few months will do that).

I knew the company was headed to the grave. I just didn’t know it was that quickly. I was the first to go because I’m expensive, or so they told me. Strictly a money thing. My confidence and sense of self worth is fragile enough that I’ve made the conscious decision to believe that.

I miss it. I did a lot of growing in that company and I will always be appreciative of the opportunities they gave me to expand my skills, take on projects, be creative and really establish my strengths. I made strong relationships there and learned to work with people and not just for them.

I have a lot of nostalgia about my working days with that little company. But truthfully, the days that bring nostalgia had faded and gone long before I was forced to turn in my keys…

I’ve just realized that I never actually turned in my keys. I guess they haven’t noticed either.

…long before I surrendered my company credit card. Business had been slow and uneventful for the last year or so. You may remember me mentioning my boredom at work a few times. It was almost agonizing. Had I not been so *ahem* skilled *ahem* at passing time on the computer, I surely would have dropped dead of mental starvation long ago.

The job I loved, that energized me and allowed me an environment in which I flourished, was lost long ago. And even though I realized it, I stayed there, clinging to the hope that any day now, things were going to turn around and we would be ramping the company up again. I stayed there, despite the offer to come work for another company. A company that is growing and bursting with energy and … things to be done.

Fortunately, this offer was still dangling at the time I was laid off, so I immediately jumped on it. Because I hate job hunting. Hate it. Will do a lot to avoid the necessity. Such as stay on board a sinking company, for example.

More on that later.  Inlaws are back, gotta go.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Blogging, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.