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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wycen" data-source="post: 4512563" data-attributes="member: 13732">Hopefully my last layoff experience will be useful for people.Not 2 months ago I left a job because I hated my boss.  But that isn't the story I'm going to tell, just that that was the place I ended up sort of as a result, (mostly it was me being lazy). I used to work for an ISP.  I think it was ASN 2041 for those curious and in the know.  I could be wrong, 6 years or so have passed.  When I joined it was privately owned and was there for maybe 4 months when it was purchased by another company.Time passed and at some point our manager, (I worked in the network operations center, which was different than the fancy "data center" our now parent company built), said that the sales people had request we all update our resumes, to show customers to help generate sales.I thought, "that's weird, but whatever".  About the same time he also asked myself and the other NOC operator who was hired the same week I was if we would like to do this exchange training idea somebody had thought up.  Every Wednesday we would work at the data center instead of the NOC.  My first thought was "no", but I didn't say that, I gave it some thought.  I had been pissed off that somebody junior to me had been given a promotion and had mentioned this to my manager, who said, "give it some time".  So I remembered that and didn't want to be thought of as being difficult, so I said, "sure"!  He said "that's exactly what I wanted to hear".The day approached when we first show up at the fancy new data center and my coworker "Big Pete" intercepts me first thing in the morning and drags me over to a computer he had been shown to and was checking email.  (The data center was operating and had its own staff but I really had barely communicated with any of them.  I had more contact with the east coast people than their California facility).The NOC operator on the zombie shift had sent an email to ALL and basically told us he (and everyone else) had been layed off and he didn't think the company had big gray walls with big gray feelings and so and and so forth.  You can imagine our apprehension.  Shortly later our manager shows up and that's when we discover that the two of us had been saved, the rest of the NOC and some other admin personel were layed off.  We settled into our new environment, spending 1 week working in the data center while the other spent a week at the NOC, switching back and forth.A year passed.  During that time I remember reading emails about the company acquiring more companies and thinking "STOP!  That's more mouths to feed!"  Eventually we got a request from the sales department.They wanted us to update our resume "to help boost sales".  IT'S A TRAP!I informed my coworkers that this is exactly what they did before.  Sure enough Wednesday became the favored day for the axe to fall.  "Big Pete" and I survived many of the purges.Then September 11, 2001 came.  We survived this, but unfortunately, this did hasten the end of things.  We lost some equipment in a building next to the towers, no personel, but it was the dot.bomb and it was only a matter of time.However, we didn't quite expect the final outcome.  I'm pretty sure it was a Wednesday, when we see the director or vp of networking unexpectedly pull up in the parking lot, (he flew out from New York).  He goes in to talk to the Data Center "manager" (I have to use that term loosely at this point).The death and dismemberment finally caught up with us.  Except that it was total carnage.  All operations in California were being ended. Both the data center and NOC got wiped out!  "Big Pete" stayed on for a few extra months to help dismantle things (why do you think he was Big Pete)?  Turned out everything not in New York was gone and 6? months later their assets were split between 2 different companies.  Bankrupt!  I can't even remember the name of one of them, but I doubt they exist either anymore.  At the time I was actually sort of relieved.  Didn't have to worry anymore and conditions toward the end got kinda draconian, tech reports had to have nit picky formatting and having just finished formatting every single BGP session my next task was labelling the web of cat 5 cable that litterred the rear of our racks.  I was happy I hadn't put much effort into that <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/glasses.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt="B-)" title="Glasses    B-)" data-shortname="B-)" /></blockquote>

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