It's been a while.

So, it's been a very long time since I last wrote in here.  In that time the financial disaster I saw coming happened.  Then I got laid off.  More about that later.  I was out of work for almost 15 months when an old acquaintance called me out of the blue and had me come in to talk about what was happening at his company, which was (more about the use of past tense later also) a competitor of my last company.  Well, long story made short, I caught on there and three and a half years later got laid off again.  So now I'm once again unemployed.  That's where I am now.  Here's how I got there.

I said that I saw a shitstorm coming back in December 2008.  Lehman had already collapsed, as did Bear Stearns.  Bernie Madoff got caught looting his customer accounts.  Those were prime examples of creative accounting, ineffectual auditing (or actual collusion) by outside auditors, and loose oversight by regulators.  But then again don't blame the regulators*.  After all they are underfunded and understaffed.  I applied with the SEC years ago, but they didn't want someone who had experience in the industry that they regulate.  They wanted accountants who have book learning.  And accounting firms just want degreed bean counters.  So there you have it.  Nobody wants help from the people who actually know what the financial firms are really doing.  It all gets explained away with finger pointing and money being thrown this way and that.  Actually I never saw any money thrown this way, just that way and the other way.  So a few hundred trillion dollars get sprayed in a bunch of directions and it pretty much got sorted out and a great deal of it got paid back.

Anyway,  the next month I was laid off from the job I had when I had last posted.  Job posting and job boards took up much of my time with resumes emailed and copy-pasted into databases.  There were some phone interviews and a couple of face to face meetings ,but nothing much came of any of them.  I didn't think much about what kind of work I wanted to be doing, just that I needed to be working.  I used up a 401k, borrowed money and did what I could or knew to do to get by.  Boy, time flies when all you have is time.  After more than fourteen months a guy who I had worked with at a previous company called me to talk about what was happening in the department he was managing.  It was a company that I had interviewed at previously and I knew he and another guy from the old company worked there.  He told me what he needed me to do, what I would be paid and when I could start.  It was like no other interview I had ever had.  Since we had worked together before for almost ten years, he knew what I was capable of.  Boom!  In a couple of weeks I was working again.

This company was spun off from a larger company which wanted to concentrate on it's main business, payroll accounting.  The business this company was in is software for stock brokerage firms, just like the last place I worked.  This one was different (aren't they all?).  There are several business units in the corporation that owned this company.  The mainframe here was an old Tandem.  That's right, Tandem.  The company that was bought out by Compaq in 1997.  Yes, Compaq, which was bought out by Hewlett Packard in 2002.  So the growth of this company was held back by archaic servers that hadn't been upgraded due to management inaction.  There was some movement to Itanium microprocessors, and I even wrote test plans to test data integrity, but program development would have been slow to implement due to a lack of developers' time.  So that was scrapped and the decision was made to shut down this company, move most of the more lucrative clients to another business unit based in New Jersey and de-convert the rest to competitors.  At least they didn't pop it on us one day and say at an all hands meeting, "OK, people, you're all fired.  We'll mail you checks for the time you have coming.  Bye."  No, they gave us about two years notice.  We who stayed on got a decent package before and after leaving, so I'm not bitter.  It just sucks having to look for work again.

But while I was out of work the last time I did acquire a new skill.  I went to classes at night to learn how to be a craps dealer.  It's pretty involved and fun, but you spend the whole time on your feet doing math problems and pulling in  or paying out chips.  And you'd better be damn quick about it because the house wins most of the time and you want to keep the dice moving so the house can make more.  All this for minimum wage plus tips.  I did get to use the skill a couple of times.  I worked at a party that a guy had where he had a craps tournament.  His friends paid some amount for buy in (like a poker tournament) and got x amount of chips.  The table I worked was pretty hot and a lot of payouts were made.  One of the players on my side of the table was knowledgeable enough to actually help me without being cocky about it, which was nice.  I made $20 for the night.  TWENTY BUCKS for four hours of work.  Two of my players (out of the three that cashed) won hundreds, but did they tip their dealer?  No, never thought of it.  Even after I congratulated them and told them they played well.  The other time I used it was an audition at a casino.  I was playing at a number of casinos to get to know the pit supervisors and see about getting a job there.  One place had an opening which I applied for.  An HR guy there called me and arranged an audition.  It was at a place where I had gotten to know the supervisor a little and his personality and management style.  He carried the persona of a hard ass and the tryout was difficult.  He started off by acting like "one of those" players, which I expected.  I was nervous as hell and, while I wasn't terrible, I wasn't very good either.  I didn't get the job.  I figured it was just the first one and I'll do a lot better next time.  There wasn't a next time.



*There really ought to be a font specifically for sarcasm.  Comic Sans would work.  It combines comedy with the word sans which has the connotation of meaning without.  So Comic Sans means funny not.  I think that would work.  I have seen it in use in business communications.  It looked bad, probably because I have this prejudice, but the user continued to use it.  It isn't one of the fonts allowed in this blog.  Oh well.