Beginning    Previous page   3    Next page  

While I was generally a minor celebrity at the companies I worked for it's not something to boast about as I take no credit for it. I was born the way I am, and gifts are often offset by disabilities. In my case autism, although it was not diagnosed until I was an adult. Fortunately one of the attributes of my case is Asperger's Syndrome. It wasn't well understood when I was younger and was only recently added to the autism spectrum as they call it. The high intelligence associated with it was useful in my case as my valuable skills helped to mitigate some of the other symptoms. I had also learned by the time I was an adult to conceal or suppress some of the more noticeable ones.

So in my case I considered it a reasonable trade-off. I was always employed with very good pay for work I enjoyed doing. Aside from my first job - at a grocery store when I was in high school - I never had a job that with overtime pay. If it took fifty or sixty hours a week to get it done that's what I did. If the compensation ceased to be sufficient for the workload I could always go somewhere else.

It has been said that no good deed goes unpunished. I don't know if that's always the case, but I've experienced it a time or three. I haven't stopped trying though, to do right in my own life and let others worry about theirs. The company I had gone to work for was acquired by a larger one, much larger, headquartered in Los Angeles and with the usual kind of personnel you get in a multi-billion dollar operation. Which is about twice as many - at least - as needed to get the job done and a lot of office politics. My little corner was safe for a while, mainly because higher management weren't quite sure what we did or how it needed to be done. It was bringing in a lot of money and that was fine for a while.

Then the CEO, nearing the end of his contract, landed a more lucrative one and prepared to leave. Which meant one more big bonus. Best way to do that? Fire a lot of people whom you'll have to replace later (at a lower cost) and show the kind of profit to justify your bonus. Which they did. I was told later that it was simply a matter of ranking department personnel by pay and chopping them off the top until the 'savings' was big enough.

Just a note about the depravity one sees in this world. The HR manager in the subsidiary I was employed was an older lady, nearing retirement age and had faithfully done her work as well as anyone might be expected to. She was told to prepare the packages of materials to be given to each employee as they were terminated - an official letter, information about looking for work and applying for unemployment (nice of them), stuff like that. Unbeknownst to her, another package was prepared for her. Once the slaughter was over she was shown the door.

As St. Paul said 'the love of money is the root of all evil' and I have often observed people doing evil things because of their lust. Not that they didn't have the right to fire me or anyone else any time they wished, but knowing the base motivation...

I did get a pretty good severance check, and took a few months off while deciding what to do next. A chance encounter with a former colleague (who didn't get fired when I did but quit in disgust soon after) led to my final job before the Beast got hold of me. He had gone to a newly formed company staffed mostly by former employees of the company that had just fired me. They had ambitious plans and he needed me.

The Internet expansion was still underway, and many small businesses didn't have websites at all. My new employer decided to pursue this market and needed to build their infrastructure. Today most would just put it on Amazon or one of the other cloud providers, but the cloud as it exists today was in its infancy. During the next eighteen years it would be a part of our operation, but always just a part. I had learned long ago about putting all the eggs in one basket, or perhaps had never been inclined to do so.

He was primarily a developer, and a good one. Like most of the good ones I've known (actually there haven't been that many) he could produce as much work as two or three people. I would be building the data center, starting with a bare room and a handful of servers. By the time of my untimely exit we had an impressive setup.



     Beginning    Previous page   3    Next page