this song has never been truer for me.

This morning, I was the last to wake up. (Well, given that I was the last to sleep, that shouldn't be a huge surprise.)

bouncing had situated himself in a corner in mom's dining room.

He showed us his recently acquired Zaurus (since I had seen Zan Lynx's on previous occassions, nothing in it came as a huge surprise to me, but it was still cool).

Then we met up with dad, and went to brunch at the Walnut Cafe. The 4 of us, doing something together, for the first time in ages. (6 months ago, to be exact.)

Afterward, with afternoon quickly upon us, the other 3 contemplated a hike. I badly would have wanted to join them, but with work approaching at 1530, it was virtually out of the question.

Then dad suggested we take a walk along the Boulder Creek bike trail. Leave my car at the king soopers, which is a block away, and then drive mom's car up past the library and walk from there. I could divert to the king soopers in time to get to my shift, and the rest of them could head back. This sounded like a most worthy plan, and so it was done.

Dad brought his digital camera along and took photos, during which I tried out a few "artistic" poses. They came out rather well. (Hmmmm... Maybe I should see if I could grab a copy of one or two of them from his iMac to post here. But he's asleep at the moment.)

Then, work. *sigh*

If there was ever a time I seriously thought it would be a good idea to disappear from the deli job, never to return again (which is exactly what as several people they previously attempted to hire did), today was it. But, for better or worse, my pseudo-puritan work ethic brought me back. (Combined with the knowledge that jobs are not exactly plentiful these days, and I'm still a few thousand dollars in debt on my car.)

Hmmm... Work today. Well, as far as grocery store deli shifts go, it was fairly non-busy. At one point, I was again reminded that despite a lot of the crap that happens, there are some really good people around me.

A guy (I don't know him) who formerly worked in the deli stopped by to say hi to his old coworkers and hang out for a while. He has since moved on to a job delivering milk to people's houses every day.

So a few minutes later, someone said to me, "There you go Ben. If you have a good driving record, you could get a job delivering milk. The pay is $13.50/hour, which would sure beat what you're making here, and you could probably get more hours too."

Okay.... Was it that obvious that I was kind of getting bummed out about the deli job? Maybe so, although I had tried not to let on.

Anyway, this was the person who had initially taken charge of my training when I first started work. She's really nice. (And yes, quite attractive. But no, not a possibility in that way. Happily married with kids, thank you. Damn, how come all the good ones are taken? :)

She said that if I ever need one, she'd be happy to give me a reference, for a milk delivery job or otherwise. (At this moment, I'm just slightly not-so-sure if I want to pursue said job, partly because it starts at 2:30am every morning, and partly because... well, despite all my bitching here, I'm not sure I want to upset what little tenuous bit of illusory stability that almost passes as a satisfactory employment situation right now.)

Shit. Yes children, let us be glad that $grocery_store management knows nothing of this web page, the contents therein, or of any personal email correspondence I may attempt to engage in outside the premises of workplace. Otherwise.... Well, I dunno. Would I be shitcanned all over again if they were to read this? Who's to say?

Sour grapes. Obviously, I still have a heap of angst piled up within me over the way things ended at my previous job. I'm not quite sure what to do with it. I've tried venting here before, in hopes that I'll "get it out of my system" and move on. But it doesn't seem to work that easily. The bad feelings just keep coming back.

I've recently come to a revelation that the reason for this could be, to a large degree, that in most regards, right up until the final weeks, I really liked and enjoyed that job, as well as the people there. But because of the nasty bits that happened right at the end (especially the way I was treated on my final day), I really haven't gotten past my anger in order to be able to grieve the loss of what I loved about it.

Yeah, there were some problems. To some degree, that's the case no matter where you go. If it had been a job I really didn't care about, it wouldn't matter, and I wouldn't even bother taking more than 5 seconds to rant about it. But obviously, the fact that I've taken the time and mental energy on multiple occassions to comment (and many times more in thoughts to myself) demonstrates that somehow, it mattered.

Dammit, I spent 2.5 years of my life there! Don't tell me to just turn around and forget about it like the whole thing was nothing. I put time, energy, and soul into that code. Other personal projects would sometimes go untouched for months at a time, not just because I was spending time at work, but because that was where my mind was.

I may write stupid little jabs about the shoddy way in which my termination was handled, but inside, I'm still fucking grieving the loss of what I had before it all went to hell.

Get over it.

Yeah, right.

Hmmmm.... Didn't quite mean to run quite so far off on this particular tangent tonight, but here I am, so I'll go ahead and follow through by adding a couple more thoughts to it, while playing another Garbage album to soothe my nerves.

1) With the above in mind, the other thing that nags me is that I can't seem to get it out of my mind that if I had done things a little differently, I'd still be employed back there. That what happened is my fault. If only I hadn't been so quick to send such-and-such email, or write such-and-such on this here web page, things might have gone differently. (Or not forgotten a certain item two weeks before. More on that momentarily.)

I've been told by more than one third party not to blame myself. That based on the way things were going, management was just looking for any easy excuse to get rid of more people, and even if I hadn't made the mistakes I did, the result probably wouldn't have been much different. Perhaps, perhaps. But the shadow of doubt still lingers in my mind.

2) As old time readers probably already know, the event which foreshadowed the whole thing -- the drop that started the rainstorm -- came two months before my end.

When the news was given to me that four, no five, people in my department had been laid off, just our portion of the entire company-wide downsizing, my initial reaction was shock. Pure shock. Things had been going so well. We had made the last release ahead of schedule. Everything had gone smoothly. Though some of us had worked several evenings in order to make it happen, our efforts had paid off, and what we had made worked.

After the shock wore off, a thought. Why am I still here? I'm no better than any of them were. In fact, if I were to guess, my role would be less critical. The answer was revealed that some of the decisions were partly due to salaries. (Higher paid people were more of a savings.) Then, the next thought...

I may be lucky now, but I can damn well bet that I'll be on the roster next time. Think quickly. Cancel my cable. Cut all (or almost all) unnecessary expenses. Do my part to contribute to the slowing of the economy, and prepare for the worst.

Ultimately, what I couldn't get over was the gradual realization that I was becoming royally pissed at the way upper management had handled the whole thing. This (amongst other factors) proved to be a pressure cooker that eventually had to be released.

I can't blame them too much for the unfortunate fact that the company wasn't going to have the money to keep up its workforce. After all, a budget is a budget.

What annoyed me the most was the way the layoffs were handled. Apparently planned in secret (exactly how long before the fact, I can't be certain), they decided to spring it on us right after everyone had worked hard to get a quality product out the door, right when many people (myself included) were going on summer vacation.

No advance warning. No time to say goodbye to your coworkers. And forget about ever having any of them come back near the building again to visit (assuming anyone even wanted to). No, the fact that they had put years of their lives into these projects didn't matter.

No, immediately after laying off all these people, who were let go for no fault of there own, it was time to go into paranoia mode. Change all the passwords. Reset the locks. Make sure building security is up to snuff, so that we can be "protected" from the people who built the software on which the product runs.

Oh, and stroke the egos of the few who remain, subtly hinting that there is something "special" about them, which is why they are still around. It wouldn't hurt to have them believe that they are somehow better than those they worked alongside with the week before.

(I've already ranted about how new marketing idiots were hired on just weeks later, and this writing has gone on long enough tonight.)

Anyway, with all of this in mind, was it really unreasonable of me to fire off an email to an address I had been told belonged to a former coworker, which included a bit of unrestrained venting?

And now I wonder if I was foolish for doing so. I can't seem to get things sorted out. I don't know how the mind of a C?O works. Didn't then, don't know. It just doesn't make sense.

Bah. I've really gone on a tangent.

(Oh yes. About having forgotten something. Before packing to go to the wedding in Washington, I attempted to make a mental note to myself to bring the medication, since it would really help in keeping my mental state in a stable pattern. But somehow, I managed to forget it. Too much happening, I guess.

So anyway, somewhere in Longview, when I realized that it wasn't there, I figured that I could handle a few days, which I did. What I didn't count on was the virtual spiral to the sky my mind would take during the weeks that followed. So.... yeah, I was loopy. And I knew it. This didn't prevent it from being so, but the knowledge did allow me to take certain mental precautions, as I did my best to ride it down. Still, the stuff I was writing was off the wall. The evidence of that is all over the ramblings made between and around August 9 to August 11.

It also probably didn't help that my productivity at work sucked the week after I came back tired and zoning after the wedding. That fact couldn't have helped any case I may have had. (I guess they quickly forgot how I had worked my ass off the week before, despite disillusionment due to said layoffs and other bad news. Oh well.))

All in the past now. Moaning over it accomplishes a grand total of zero now.

Alright, this is way long tonight. I'd also like to do some stuff with bouncing and/or the family and/or scottgalvin.com tomorrow before my shift, so sleep is required NOW. Peace.