Pissed off vs. Pissed on

Today I find myself a little of both.

I was called into the confrence room today and told that the company I was contracted to requested that today be my last day.

Yes, I am officially unemployed.

Fortunately I was laid off, not fired- turns out business wasn’t as good as they were hoping and they can’t afford someone to try and fix their broken infrastructure. Since they fired a developer a few weeks ago, and the lead developer put in his 1 week notice today, I can’t say it’s suprising- if they’re getting rid of me after losing two other people, they must be hemmoraging money pretty badly.

The worst part is, not only did I see this coming, but I worked my ass off there knowing it was coming. I was hoping they’d at least have the decency to give me some severance pay, but apparently since I’m just a contractor they don’t feel the need. They did however give me a nice 1 paragraph recommendation letter- I guess that makes up for laying off a guy with a kid on the way who they shouldn’t have hired if they knew they wouldn’t be able to afford him.

I’m pretty pissed off right now because I feel like I made a mistake coming back to michigan- I won’t be able to find work around here since I’m pretty specialized (michigan is Microsoft territory, and at this point I’m pretty specialized in linux) and the economy is crap to boot.

The worst part about all of this is jackie and I went so far into debt to move back and we still haven’t dug out. Now jackie’s pregnant and my hopes for employment are slim to none, and we couldn’t even afford to move somewhere else if we wanted to because our credit cards are maxed out from the last move.

I feel pretty bad for the other sysadmin because they’re gonna crap back on him again and he’s just gonna take it. The Devs are screwed because I did a lot to make their development environment more professional- seperate user accounts, testbeds, standardized development/beta/production servers, version control, etc- most of that will go down the shitter because it will all be neglected if it’s even kept at all. the other sys admin will probably either format them or ignore them.

It’s been a hell of a day, and I need to take a shower still after my walk- then I’m going to bed. If you know of anyone looking to hire a Linux Sys Admin or a perl/php/ruby developer (or some combination of either), send them my way.