Category — Rants

CAROLINA at MONTREAL May 2, 2006 at 7:00 PM Eastern

Carolina Wins 2-1 in over time.

Flashback to August 1st, 2005

Just evaluating the sequence of events at my office presently.  It looks as though I may be looking for a job shortly.  So will 100 other people.  Despite our downsizing, the owners just announced that the company maybe closing and that this week, payroll is not guaranteed.  Nice feeling!  Anyway, for now I’ll stick it out and hope I’m not working as a volunteer.  With that news came my responsibilities of letting 3 people go.  That was just a week over of letting another one go. 

It does hit you rather funny after 24 years of service.  I guess the rest of this year’s vacations are shot.  It really makes you evaluate where your two feet are.  Support from the family has been great, Just putting the final touches on my CV.

To jump ship or not to jump ship, there is a certain amount of loyalty with me that says, you stay until the end, if that’s what’s around the corner…Around the corner happens to be the big question.  There’s enough floating around that indicates things will turn around for many of us not to make this move of jumping ship.  On the other hand, the consequences are high.  Mortgage, car payments, credit line…Family vacation which I’m definitely due for…School supplies and every day life always around the corner.

Well a week has passed by, payroll went through and the bank sure has been busy studying our situation.  Decisions are being taken and the general direction of the company changing.  The keyword here is survival.  No one can tell the future, but we can certainly reflect on the recent past history.  That would be too easy for the moment to do.

August 9th

Thing is with this new general direction,  comes 7 more cuts, which will have a devastating effect on the rest of the staff as well.  It makes for a lot of luggage to carry around for everybody.  -NOT GOOD.  As I went to bed that night, it occurred to me that I’d cut nearly 200 years of experience in the office alone in the last 3 weeks

I managed to turn around most suppliers to work C.O.D. to keep operating.  The interim receiver(no names here) put the keys in the door to control dual access.

Whereas the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act (the “Act”) provides the Superintendent with the general power to supervise the administration of all estates and matters to which the Act applies;

I’ve seen the book, I’m sure it’s over 2500 pages, for the purpose of this entry the above will do… Anybody reading this would get the idea.

In short the bank decides to call the loan, since you’re statement is out of balance they start shitting themselves.  A third party is called in to recover the money by either liquidating assets or keep you in business to collect your receivables and pay off the loan slowly but surely.

They can put you up for sale anytime, if that means they have enough money to fulfill their mandate… To get the bank their money back.  Your payables mean nothing… There could be a proposal to pay back 10 cents to the dollar.  The creditors call you everyday, hounding you for a possible separate deal, to settle outstanding debts.  They tell you over and over how much they’ve lost and how it will hurt their business.

The creditors, know that.  They hate you right away and call all their friends to tell them. Your creditors all get a list of how much money you to everyone.  So you have no credit rating anywhere.  Unless you deal with another operation that has a lousy credit manager and they skip the credit check!

October 2nd:

After working a gruesome month doing 3 desks, juggling suppliers,  there seems to be a certainty of continuation.  It looks like we will not be shutting down after all.  At least that’s what it seems for a moment and then someone drops a negative notion and we really don’t know which direction things are really going.

One of our competitors has got a foot in the door now, looking at probably picking up some equipment and perhaps some running programs.  Not a good feeling to have your competitor walking through the joint looking at your dirty laundry.

November 4th.

Our boys (owners) don’t seem to be the quickest at making things happen, it could be to their advantage.  However, Mr. Bank has  drawn in the competitor to stimulate things.  Yesterday was suppose to be witching hour.  Still no news:  Float or sink??

We all wonder whether we should start Christmas shopping or not.

Dec 10th

Well it’s all over and we survive!  Our boys engineered some sort of buy back plan and life goes on, downsizing and changing the orientation from Manufacturing to importing we do remain one of the leaders in what we do.  Throughout the ordeal, our customer orders continued.  Largely what kept us afloat.  Of course.

What lies ahead is the future and let’s hope it’s as prosperous as most of the past years I’ve seen with this firm.  August 9th to October 28th was one of the largest periods of uncertainty I’ve lived through in my life.  Not a good one when you carry a family.

There’s a certain feeling of satisfaction out of having been there all the way through and participating in the survival process.  Didn’t jump ship as some did.

Part of my survival process was this other blog I created.  It took my mind off of things… I will keep it going as it has kept me going.  In a way, this entry which has taken four months to finish is the excuse why I stopped working on the original.  When there’s nothing good to write about in real life… You kind of drop it.

Surely, I will start writing here again soon…For my self… I always do these little projects for my self.  I like tweaking software.

Lot’s of catching up here…

My last real post was Avril Lavigne…

So much going on at work, but that will be for another entry which has actually been started since about August 2nd.  Won’t go there now, not yet.   To keep my mind off I’ve been concentrating on posts over at the other place :-)  For those of you who know the other place you knpw why it keeps my mind occupied!

With 11 vacation days left, I took this Friday off.  Just around the house.  I’ll probably take a few more.  The first one was a bit of a disaster…Still nice to be home with DW.

My Lyra 40 gig MP3 player just started freezing up, so Future Shop gladly exchanged it with a Gigabeat.  Hummm  I don’t know why they still call them MP3 players.  You can’t play the file after it’s been scrambled onto the player.  Just on the player. 

Anyway, the Gigabeat has a nice little screen.  Displays pictures too.  The gigabeat software takes a lot of overhead on my system, P4 2.6ghz 1g ram.  It shouldn’t take that much.  I figure it’s just badly done.  Load your songs, make you’re play lists and that’s it. 

I miss the Lyra.  You just used it as an extra HD.  So this week end I got a W.Digital HD Good for storing Data.  Less Clunky on the C:\ Drive.  Kind of cool.  I shared the music directory on our network, so DW and DS can use it.  I’ll get the camera to dump directly on it too, see how that goes.

As USB 2 you can only do so many things with it.  you don’t want to be transfering large files while listening to music.  When that little wire or port gets too much traffic, things go kind of hairy.  Still If you manage it properly it does the trick.  Not to mention the back ups.