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consolidating workplaces
Friday, May 18 2001
Excellent ecstasy peaking music from Coldplay:
Bones, sinking like stones
All that we fall for
Homes, places we've grown
All of us are done for
But we live in a beautiful world.
Especially since moving to California, I'm not sure about the beautiful world part, but I would have to agree with the idea that all of us are done for. It's a song that has been going through my head a lot lately, especially today as I was moving stuff from the cubicle in my evacuated building into a cramped corner office shared by five other technical people in the one building where the company will, for the time being, remain. "Don't worry about the quality of your seats," we were told, "things ought to open up around her shortly." In other words, more layoffs are just around the corner. All of us are done for. As a fellow developer pointed out today, it's a little like Survivor, except we're mostly off-camera and the last person on the island loses big time.
By the way, the aforementioned Coldplay song is the only one I really like on their debut album Parachutes. Originally I was introduced to it by Chun (who listens to all the hip new adult contemporary music suggested by KCRW) and then I downloaded a copy of that song ("Don't Panic") by searching Napster for songs by a band called "Cold Play." The database integrity chaos being introduced by the court-ordered filtering of the actual names of bands and songs gives profound discomfort to my sense of harmony. Similarly, I'm also disgusted by the way COPPA has forced everyone less than 18 to be dishonest about the years of their births.
One last thing about Coldplay: I think I prefer to listen to "Don't Panic" over the slowly-shifting audio textures of a "deep ambient" Shoutcast station.
At the end of the day the entire company gathered in a parking lot behind the building and partook of paper cups of Sam Adams drawn from a keg. The CEO told us we're back in startup company mode again and if this isn't what you signed up for, no hard feelings, now would be a good time to leave. I don't know the employees were really thinking (the vitriol over at FuckedCompany.com continues), but for the most part people seemed to be flattered that they still have jobs. I'd brought my videocamera and was filming the crowd just because I felt it interesting to document this phase of a dotcom's life cycle. Some guy, some unknown co-worker, came up to me and asked (with a semi-belligerent tone) why I was filming, and I said it was "for my own purposes." He seemed skeptical and kept quizzing me about what I was doing, finally walking away with a look like he wanted to punch me. Some of these people, would be heroes of the company in this its hour of crisis, are evidently riled up and indignant about all the bad press, and the last thing they want is to see their beer-drinking post-layoff celebrations on FuckedCompany.com.
[REDACTED]
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