I read the Austin American Statesman maybe twice a week, just because it's a pain to fin the local news. It's never been a great paper and recent years have seen most all Texas papers under the shadow of Cox media sliding into the same bland format. The decline of newspapers hurts me, but that's not what I want to talk about.
The article below is about the company I used to work for, in the days of the dotcom boom. Rather, folks from Trilogy created the spinoff that became my company. It was working for PcOrder that taught me dedication to a job can be so frustrating, so painful and in the end meaningless. There are things briefly mentioned in this article that knock me vividly back into those years - memories of the late nights, the constant IM sessions with the Pune office, the software crashes, the guy who bet his car on the outcome of sports game, doing my homework in my office, the people I worked with, the times I cried at my desk, the stress, the week I took off work on doctor's orders, screaming at the valets in the parking lot, Marcus sleeping in his office when he knew he was on the way down, that horrid Stephanie woman, the time I stuffed the question box with a number of nasty and aggressive questions about layoffs and poor decision making, my screaming rage when they fired the most productive people on my team, how they isolated me out of fear I would cause a scene when they fired Steven, the receptionist desk up front that was never ever used by anyone, the time I threatened to hit our boss in the head with a coffee pot in front of the entire research staff, the way we traded urls for mail-order brides that inevitably popped up when searching for SKUs, the guy who spent a solid week looking at hardcore porn instead of working, Heather & Scott as the weirdest couple ever, the French accented systems guy who went through all our hard drives looking for evidence to fire us and getting Fernie, Monday night dinners at LaMo, the airconditioning that didn't work when we moved into Amherst and how Steven & I had to buy giant fans at Walmart so we wouldn't die while working in the dark...
I worked so hard at that job and for what? Just thinking about it makes me so angry.
Trilogy has eliminated more than a thousand jobs in the Austin area over the past few years, but they certainly have the resources to give them all to India. I'm all for the economic development of the world, but not at the expense of other people's lives.
( Statesman article on Trilogy's move to India )![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}