Dom Barnes

Last days at work

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 | work

Today marks the final day of my working life in Financial Services. Today I had a trip to Manchester to demo a database, little knowing that I would probably not see most of my colleagues again. So Tuesday seems to be the last day for that. As of 15th May I’ll be unemployed (well 16th really). Its (hopefull) the end of an era.

I’ve been working in FS for about 5 years now, starting originally at Norwich Union in 2003 and working there until 2006, when I moved up to Birmingham, and then went into FS again just as a temporary job. As often happens I settled and put a new job on the back burner, and then over the past year, I have been slowly working toward my IT qualifications, hoping to move over.

Well that time came upon me quicker than I planned, and I also got a little pay out to go with it. Without mentioning the company name, we have been going through some changes, and found out a few months back our office was going to close. After hearing that it just became an issue of when.

Today on my train journey I was listening to Leo Laporte talk on TWiT about the Yahoo/Microsoft business and in particular, some of the comments about Yahoo sounded all to familiar. Jerry Yang and other Yahoo bods made comments about now that the Microsoft deal deadline passed, they can move on and focus on being  more efficient business. And that is literally what the bosses at my work were saying.

My worry is for the company that they are already too far down that path, and that for years they have been hiding failure behind small successes, and of course that means for the current employees, a tough time, uncertainty and risk of redundancy too.

But I’ve been through it now and have to look foward to a new job. I’m looking at starting off as some sort of technician, doing installation and repairs or hardware and network stuff, hopefully in a full time position, but I’m also looking at contract work so we’ll see how we get on.

Either way, I’ve got some time to myself which I will spend making music, tidying the house and seeing a variety of films, and probably blog a fair bit too!

Tags: redundancy, work

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