Don't Come Back − 13 April, 2001
I had been working for LevelEdge for 8 months and loved it. I was being paid more than I ever thought I could make at 25 years old and I was the only project manager that the company had. We had been going through financial tough times and we all thought that the ride would be over soon. Companies in the Bay Area were folding left and right and everyone I knew had been laid off or knew someone who had.
I remember not being worried about being laid off. I figured that I would be out of work for a couple months and then find something to continue my career. The real downfall was when our CEO gave the entire company a week “vacation”. I can home to So. Cal to visit the P’s and thought it would be great to relax and let the powers that be get the funding we needed to continue working.
At the end of the week we had a conference call with the entire company. On this date was when they dropped the bomb. “LevelEdge will not longer be providing its services”. What was strange about the way they told us that we didn’t have jobs anymore, was the fact that they never actually said that we didn’t have jobs anymore. It was sad in a way. Some of the other employees began asking questions about how to take customer calls and answer company emails. The phone was silent for a moment because all the others knew that they would have to explain that the company was shut down, no emails, no customers, no nothing… that was it. It’s strange to have to explain that the job and company that you had spent long hours, late nights, and had dedication to was gone in an instant.
One of the best decisions I’ve ever made was leaving the comforts of IBM to go out into the world of dot com and be a part of the technological revolution. I’ve always felt like I could someday tell my grandkids about the time that I lived in the heart of an economical anomaly.
It was also the worst decision that I’ve ever made to leave IBM. As I will describe in later entries in Dandelife, I spent the next 10 months unemployed and it sent me, although I didn’t know at until years later, into a deep depression.
I had never failed that bad before. Losing my job made me feel like I had failed in something I had worked for all my life; success.
Comments:
kga245 (July 25, 2006. 11:12pm)
Some things are out of your control. You'll never be guaranteed success. Not even at IBM. Try as you might to hold up your end of the bargain, it takes both sides to define and continue to maintain success. That my two cents anyway.