LAID OFF

Surya laid me off this morning. And after all the nice things I said about them!

I wasn’t totally surprised — they don’t need two IT people when they are downsizing across the board. With my boss back from Bali, they no longer need me to cover his tasks while he is away. And the way my direct boss has been acting since even before he returned from Bali, I could tell something was up. I figured if they were going to lay me off, they would do it after his next Bali trip, but… I guess not.
I’ve been wanting to move somewhere a little more technical anyway, but I really hate to leave a good thing. And though they shorted me on hours and the pay wasn’t great, I stand by my “Thankful” post. They DID give me a job when it seemed nobody else would. They DID give me a massively huge variety of things to do and left it to me to decide how to best do them.
What does this mean? Well, it means that Sigil, SOE, and Raph Koster’s new company will be hearing from me (again, in the cases of the first two), since all three are local. UCSD will again find me on their doorstep. Ally’s mother-in-law (my co-grandmother? Is there a word for that?) says she may know of some positions at her company up in Temecula. My sister Hillary is looking at some Boston-area opportunities for me, since that’s where she lives and works. And there’s a certain new Boston-area games company that will be getting my resume because hey, I’m free to live life in a new direction and if you never go for the long-shots, you never win.

8 thoughts on “LAID OFF”

  1. Sorry! I know the pain well! I’ve been there myself… I’m from the Boston area… Actually, green monster games (sp?) is in Maynard, very close to my stomping grounds. I use to live in the next town over. In fact, monster.com is in maynard as well.

  2. Sorry to hear that. Don’t forget to ping Grimwell, since he’s now Community Czar for EQ2. He might be able to provide some leads.

  3. Aww:( That sucks:( Sorry to hear it:( If I were rich I would give you a million dollars, but I’m not, so I guess that sucks for us both:( Hope you find a new job soon!

  4. 🙁
    Hang in there hon, you’ve got experience and you’ve got a great attitude. This may actually turn out to be a good thing!

  5. Thanks for all your support!
    My sister and I spent hours last night in Gmail chat working on my resume to better highlight the things I’ve done. I guess it was hard to extract reasons why you might want to consider hiring me from the old resume.
    She also advised me to kinda cool it about my (old) job on the blog here re: my recent anger at games they played with my hours as a prelude (I now know) to getting rid of me. So this post will be the last about my job or job search until I have another one.
    Today, apply for unemployment :/

  6. Sorry to hear that you where laid off but sometimes it is a mixed blessing. I know that when I was laid off from my last job it was oddly a releif that I finally got out. That was back in 2002 when as a programmer I’d rather keep a shit job simply because it was better than no job. Considering all the things you did for them, I think they might find themselves in the same situation as my previous employer did and your absence will be felt.
    I wish you good luck in finding a job in the gaming industry. It is a dream that many of us have and that you might actually be able to achieve. The fact that you have contributed to the Nethack code base and won an Obfuscated ‘C’ Contest way back while not relevant for most jobs may be significant here.

  7. Well, I was working for a small women’s clothing company. We had a fantastic year in 2005 but 2006 was a bit of a slump. We’re always supposed to be doing something productive with our time, so when I wasn’t doing work like fixing computers or crashed Outlook .PST files, I was working on improving our email system by taking it internally from the less-than-stellar company who hosted it before, writing JavaScript and Python web pages to make internal reports far more useful and what not — the kind of thing IT people do in, say, a hundred person company, but not so much at our level. So I kinda figured they’d look around and wonder if they really needed a programmer on staff.
    Anyway, I am hopeful. I do have a lot of skills and with my sister’s help on selling myself, hope to be able to show companies how well I would work with what they do.

  8. This morning my sister Hillary and I finished our long-distance collaboration on my resume and… there it is, my life in two pages. My GOD I’ve done a lot of things. It’s a tantalizing short story about so many years and dangit, I’d like to hear more.
    Hillary sent me bunches of examples of what she and her friends are sending around in Boston and my ‘old faithful’ resume looked deadbeat and downtrodden against them.
    Anyway. It’s the kind of resume that makes me excited about the job hunt.
    I’ve told Hillary she’s a goddess BECAUSE IT’S TRUE!

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