Ted and Me

Since my relatively abrupt departure from Great Big Computer Company, I've been somewhat more sensitive to articles and whatnot about layoffs. I've been aware for some time that layoffs are the action of choice when company management wants to show that it is On Top Of Things and Working Hard To Get The Company Where It Needs To Be -- not so much in their own eyes, but in the eyes of Wall Street, which is where half of the directing of most major companies happens these days (the other half, or close as makes no difference, being in the auditors department). Not to say that it doesn't matter what the managers of the company think or do, but it does seem that they take their direction and marching orders from those two locations, primarily.

So when I read that Dell plans to lay off eight thousand people this year, I winced, thinking that that was more than GBCC had done so far (though, perhaps, not cumulatively). And when I read that Motorola also plans layoffs, I winced again. That senior managers of both organizations essentially said that this was all they knew how to do in order to repair their respective companies malaise, in order to get them back on the high road of profitability and then some (because Wall Street doesn't pay off unless you're making more, and sometimes considerably more, than they thought you would ) -- well, that didn't help my impression of their general competence. Let alone, their sensitivity. Perhaps its simply that companies drive too close too the edge, expect too much, or too much is expected of them -- they don't have wiggle room for when the company hits bumps. And perhaps its that competition really is fierce, and customers fickle. This is all theoretical knowledge to me, as no one -- not the managers of the computer company I used to work for, nor the managers of the one I just worked for, ever seemed to feel it necessary to trickle down information about how the company was doing, in any useful terms. We were always out there stomping the competition, doing remarkable, innovative things while aweing the analysts, and multicolored flowers sprang from the cement where the chairman's shadow fell. Cold realities never touched our web page.

But when I found that Ted Forth, the husband in the yuppie comic strip Sally Forth, had lost his job -- I realized: This IS a big deal. This IS, in fact, what Clinton the First referred to as The Economy, Stupid. And when I read in the strip about 'adjusting the budget' and such, I wince, even when I think 'but Bill, your position, financially, is quite sound'. Yes, it is, I know that. But you know what they say about 'you can never be too rich or too thin'?

Yup.