It’s official: I’ve been laid off by my daytime employer. Ironically, this is some pretty freakin’ good news… I know that might sound weird but, honestly, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

A well known scientific fact is that a body at rest tends to stay at rest. Well, I’ve been at my [former] company for the last six years and eight months and I was very much at rest. Staying for at a job that long is no easy feat, given that I joined the company before the rise of the .Com companies and that the place survived a couple of years after the collapse of the .Com companies. I started as a Software Engineer and will be leaving them a Principle Engineer/Architect. I was able to stay with them for so long because they a) had funds to meet payroll all this time and b) they allowed me to keep them current in their technology tools and systems: from the start of ActiveX, through the problem-free Y2K non-event, and to the current trend of .NET applications. Basically, I was given freehand to code and design, provided that I gave them results.

And results I gave: always on time and under budget. I usually came in under my initial estimates of effort and produced a lot of bug-free code. Well, as bug-free as code can be, but some server based modules would go for a year or more before something had to be updated. Things were good for a while.

So what happened? Cash, or lack thereof. Even a charmed life has an end, especially with a shortage of paying customers, and I was given my walking papers during the last possible layoff – there’s only 15 or so people left – with another five colleagues. My boss was really broken up about it… I’ve worked for him for over a half of decade after all and he’s been a pretty good guy about work stuff. In a lot of ways he’s been a great manager – especially given the type of place that we worked at.

I wasn’t surprised by the layoff, actually. Honest! A lot of people were asking me if I was OK and I’m fine. I do have to admit it, though: I’ve never seen so many depressed people about keeping their jobs during a round of layoffs. I was bouncing around the office, as I packed up what few things I had left in the office – I had packed up a bunch of stuff when they missed payroll for a second time a number of months ago – because like I said… this was expected. Ya can’t get so deep in a hole without at least considering getting laid off, especially after the 4th round goes by. There was many a day that I thought “Oh… we’re still open. Crap!” and now it’s not my problem.

Now I find myself without a job for the first time in years. The last few times I was jobless it was by my choice… I’ve never been laid off before. Sorta neat, really, because I’ve had no choices to make. There were a few times that I could have – or even should have – left my job and made a new start, but I hesitated… I had stock options – a lot of worthless paper now – that had already made me some money and I had the freedom of technology, so I wasn’t too keen on leaving then. Now I can’t second guess myself and that type of situation is invaluable to me. It will also give me time to detox myself from the troubled times I had to endure over the last few years – I think I could use the time off, frankly, even if it is only a week or two… it will be enough!

The only bad thing about all of this is that Scott Adams will have to follow someone else around to base Dilbert off of… I think I was his sole source of his story ideas for a long while. Way too much like my real life the last few years!

Anyone need a programmer for some coding work? I do do Windows, after all.

On a brighter not, I figure I’ll get a pretty good book out of the whole ordeal someday; the outline is already over 25 pages as of last month’s events and now it can stop growing!