The year started out with a new house for my family and myself, as well as a new server (Silverdragon) for this site. And I also decided, "Why make life hard for myself?" and tried to use an HTML editor. I tried several, and you know what? They sucked. When you are used to designing your own code, never go to a program that does it for you, because you will be sadly disappointed. Most HTML editors do this:
Christine took up artwork, and ended up heading the FanTek Art Show for CastleCon Ten with our friend cjae (yes, he name is spelled that was with lower caps like e.e. cummings). I created a site for her, but she couldn't really get to it. Little CR's after school day care was cancelled due to some petty liability issue (nothing happened, it was a lot of "what if" kind of worry). On top of that, he was in the school play, his first play, and no one told us. CR said he didn't think we could get off work to come. That is so sad.
Work started to become unstable. I was in charge of a project called "Virtual Places for the Mac," and I didn't have a lot to do. So I started taking advantage of my spare time, and took classes in MS Excel and MS Access. I also tried to teach myself C++, but that fell short when it was announced my company's Tucson site was going to start doing Beta Testing, and I was put in charge of training documentation. But my co-workers and I felt that an ill wind was blowing. Between approvals, my supervisor suggested to take all kinds of training, and take it quickly. I started looking for another job inside the company, hopefully one with standard 9-5 kinds of hours.
Spring came in, and so did some financial relief. I started desinging web pages for other people, and started earning extra money, which I re-invested into my computer. Christine attempted to sell Mary Kay, but that caused some problems of its own. Suddenly, my extra money had to be used just to pay off some sudden bills and other expenses. I am sick of being poor all the time.
More bad news. Just as my web page broke its 1000th hit, Silverdragon had a massive error with its kerberos kernel, and this site had to be temporarily ported to my AOL Account. It didn't fit, so I had to spread it over two accounts, which really got to be a pain. Plus, AOL's web server kept going down. And I couldn't get to my web site at Silverdragon to place a forwarding page to send them to the new site. What a mess.
Then, the announcement at work came. "Your jobs have been eliminated. We're not sure what to do with you." It wasn't a shock, since a lot of people had been doing nothing for the past few months, but now they had to lay us off. The package was fairly good, you had three months to find another job, and if you didn't, you got a bonus and four weeks of pay. Depending on how much you made, that meant about $4000 before taxes to some people. But then they put the thumbscrews on to try and make you quit so they wouldn't have to pay you that severance. Some people fought back, and were fired for insubordination. And no other division in the company seemed to want to hire you, despite their desperate postings in local newpapers and their own web sites. Why were we being blacklisted? I was getting interviews inside the company before the lay-off was announced, but not after. But just when it seemed like we were completely screwed, one person in our department stood up at the annual stockholder's meeting, and asked directly (but professionally) why our department was being blacklisted, and why our company would want inside talent to go to other companies. That made an embarrassing blow! But suddenly, we were no longer blacklisted, and they stopped treating us like doggie-doo. I started getting interviews again.
The summer heat brought my 1500 mark to visitors on my page, and my son turned seven. We didn't have a lot of money to hold a party this year, and we were saving in case I did get laid off in the Fall. I wanted to stay with my current company, but didn't depend on it, so I was handing out resumes like crazy. This also picked up my web business, but I began to find out that a lot of people did not know what a webmaster or HTML designer did, so they hired someone from inside their own company. I got "cash-under-the-table" jobs this way, because a lot of people that said, "Yeah, I can manage our company's Intranet," found out they couldn't (because they were trying to use HTML editors, haw haw haw), and I would be paid to fix what they screwed up, or do work for them without their bosses finding out. For one job, I had complete access to their internal network, and pointed out a lot of security holes (which, to my knowledge, they never fixed). The problem with this part-time contracted work is that in many cases, nothing legal was written up, and so I was limited to the whim of someone's wallet to whether I could get paid or not.
I decided to go back to my old job and see if they had any part time positions. They didn't, but it was weird seeing my old store again. It's odd to be in a place that was once so familiar, you knew every crack and bump, only to see it's all been paved over with someone else's... or several someone elses' care. Yes, in a year and a half, they went through five or six managers. That store's a killer! Later that year, the store was closed. In fact, the whole company bought themselves out and became employee-owned. An old friend and employee was now president. They seemed to be doing well on their own.
But that became moot. One of my internal interviews that kept calling me back and forth called me to let me know the guy they offered the job to refused. The guy who refused told me it wasn't worth the money, but since I didn't have a degree, it might be worth a shot, and he recommended me. So on August the 1st, I became a Telecom Hardware Specialist. A 9-5 (okay 7:30-4:00) job, plus travel, laptop, pager, corporate card, and paid second phone line to my house. Woo-hoo! No more worries. Plus, free training!
Castlecon Ten was a mixed bag. Christine and cjae blew everyone away with their art show, and I met a man by the name of Mark Mandolia, who it turned out was the new head of KatsuCon. Katsucon was a Japanime convention, which with the recent close of another anime convention, was now the largest on the East Coast. And instead of it being in the Norfolk area, it would be local, in Alexandria. For years, all my cool friends said I should attend this convention, and now I could. Mark suggested I volunteer. I did. I am now running their "at-the-door" registration. I must be nuts. :) Also at "CCX", I ran the Costume Call, since Kimber was off getting married, and Julie was her bridesmaid. On Friday, they had a legendary bachelorette party, from what I hear. I didn't do as bad a job running the masquerade as I thought, but I'll never be as good as Julie and Kimber.
But at work, it was pretty bad. Sometimes, when I looked over the wasteland of abandoned pods, I thought I was in some sort of desert. I passed by dusty desks with ancient coffee marks, an occasional sticker or pushpinned memo, some memos still fresh enough not to be yellowed. Scraps of technology sparsely littered the desks here and there, with blue 10-Base-T wires hanging out from behind cracks like thirsty children, begging for a computer to connect to. The occiasional dead mouse laid upside-down, sometimes with its brother, the keyboard. Three-ring binders to old software were discarded like ancient tomes of wisdom long forgotten. Once in a while you came across a computer, usually the gutted carcass with part of its insides exposed, or a dusty monitor with a red sticker that proclaims its death like a Post-it tombstone. "13in VGA: Bad Tube, Dec 95 -- JV." Small dust bunnies laid about like miniature tumbleweeds while a bleak sun filtered from a set of misaligned window blinds. Depressing stuff...
The Fall brought a movie to me, and my son and I got to play actors who play zombies in a horror spoof called, "Attack of the Killer Cameraman," which also starred Julie Fuller. My friend Kevin Prysock was the director, and he loved shoot scenes with me, in zombie makeup, chasing people around the set. I'll let you know when it gets released.
Just as my page crossed my 2000th hit, I got a new (used) computer for next to nothing, and started a network in my house to share hard drive space and resources. I also invested in a computer desk, because what I had been using was the same desk I had as a child, a 1950's Lane Writing Desk. It was built before the days of terms like "monitor footprint," and was a pain in the &*^@! to compute at.
Christine took up cake decorating, and the orders started to come in. She made a line of Christmas Cakes, and gained a lot of free advertising when the United Way auctioned one of her cakes off. I went to San Jose for some Aspect Call Switch training, and had dinner with a cousin I hadn't seen in ten years. I also attended the Maryland Renn Fest, and saw a lot of my friends, and my son got a nifty sword and shield.
A discussion of "Let's trade our car next year before it goes bad and has less value," turned into, "Why not now, when it has even less wrong with it an more value?" A lot of things went our way, including a low rate car loan, and owning a car that was apparently high in demand. So, after ten years of wanting one, we finally got a 1998 Saturn Station Wagon, our first brand-new car. What a Godsend this thing is to shop in. And it has a little remote button thingee with all the options, including security and trunk opening.
Silverdragon went through a security upgade, and now I can no longer telnet or use any FTP connection to it because my computer does not have a static IP address. So I have to use dial-up through Digex, which assigns me an IP, and then telnet via CLI to Silverdragon. This means I have to do everything thoru PICO again, instead of Notepad and WinFTP like I was getting used to. Oh well, I was spoiled anyway.
Then they had this massive layoff at work *again*, which makes this fourth lay off I have dodged the bullet from since I started working for this massive company in March of 1996. This kind of stress is unbelievable. And our company isn't doing poorly, either! Our stock is the highest it's been since the recent split, we just celebrated a milestone of customer levels (many millions, twice what it was two years ago), and our company makes the #1 product in its field. But for a company that prides itself on customer service, they sure are laying off a lot of people in customer service. This sucks. My job changed from Hardware Specialist to Telecom Programmer, because the laid off too many programmers and anyone with my level of experience had to take up the slack.
Then I moved. They moved our office to where I used to work, so now my pod is next to the pod I *used* to work at, a few months ago in the Beta area. We'll see how this works. And then Silverdragon moved, physically, to a new home in Greenbelt, and this site was offline into the New Year.
The last bit of news of the year came as a bummer. Our friend Gay has this
cousin who
is a former (?) drug addict with an abusive husband and seven children. Years
ago, Gay adopted one of these kids, a little girl named Kiki. That was back
when I was unemployed, and since I was taking care of CR, I ended up taking care
of Kiki for a while. She was a wonderful little girl, but it was obvious from
the bruises and the psychological scars that she had been abused. She was
half-white, and her parents were both black. So that meant... uh-huh, you
guessed it, and the father wanted nothing to do with Kiki, or the two other
suspiciously pale children. After Kiki had been out here for a while, her
biological mother decided she needed the welfare, and demanded Kiki back. Gay
was forced to give her back, and this caused tremendous heartbreak for all of
us. Its been many years since then. And this woman was pregnant again, and
now social workers got involved. So she said Gay could take Kiki back if she
would also take Kiki's brother and a yet-to be born child. Gay cannot take care
of a baby with her job, lifestyle, and her own son, who is now 12. She has to
have school age children. But her cousin was firm. After much discussion with
Gay and discussion in our own family of three, we agreed to adopt the unborn
baby under two conditions: First, she is ours. No takebacks. We fully adopt
her.
We didn't want another Kiki incident to tear our heart open. Second, that we
don't
play the "I changed my mind" game over and over, which this woman is notorious
for. At first, the woman was appalled that we were white. This is ironic,
since
the baby turned out to be half-white (she was born shortly before Christmas).
The father was furious, since this made the fourth white mixed child. After a
lot
of pulling back and forth, the woman finally said no, she was going to keep the
baby. Fine. We're not going to force anyone away from their infant. I'd be
lying to you if I said it didn't hurt. I pessimistically guessed this would
happen, but that doesn't take the hurt away. And it's not the hurt that we
didn't get her as much as the knowledge of who that innocent child has for
parents.
But if anything good came of this, it was that we started discussing adoption
openly in our household. We don't really want to go the foster child route,
but no matter the race our country of origin, we're going into the New Year
thinking like a family of four.