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the farmer and the soon-to-be-slaughtered cow
Wednesday, October 29 2025
Among the things I have been doing at work while waiting for Angular to compile or to just get me away from all the associated tedium has been to add file uploads to the generic form tool at the heart of the web-based admin tool for my ESP8266 Remote Control system. Yesterday I got it working well enough that a thumbnail added to a mobile device would be shown as the last known location on the map of its adventures. Today I made it so that the a database entity can have any number of uploads. Fields of type "file" provide an upload feature and store the original name of the file in that column. The actual file, though, is stored in a folder named after the table in a file named after the column name and the primary key value of the record.
It shaping up to be a typical dreary day spiced with such pleasures when the lead developer guy told me the CEO wanted me to see him. I went down to his office and couldn't find him, but it turned out that he and the project manager guy from the Lunchroom Court were in a small conference room I didn't know about off the side of the CEO's office. "Oh!" I exclaimed, "you have another room!" The CEO was in a grim mood and told me to shut the door, which I immediately recognized as a bad sign. But I've been braced to be fired for months. So when he told me, "It's not working out," I said. "Okay!" as cheerfully as I could, even though I could feel tension in my stomach. The project manager looked away the whole time as the CEO spoke. He handed me some papers for unemployment and such. Evidently my productivity hadn't ever rebounded enough for him to decide to keep me (though he didn't say this). Then I snapped out of my faux cheerfulness and said that I never really felt like I was allowed to thrive at the company and that I never really felt that my talents were tapped. The CEO asked if the developers up in the developer room collaborated, as he'd been told they do. "No," I said simply. I then characterized that room as "dysfunctional." This got the CEO thinking, and he said that maybe he could hire me back later as a contractor. "I'd love that," I said, though I was probably just being polite. And he was probably just being polite to have suggested such a thing. In any case, I was definitely being fired for the time being, and there was no talk of severance or any such things. For some reason I offered that I hadn't actually needed the job. ("That's kind of what I thought," said the CEO) but that main issue now was what I was going to do for health care. The meeting ended with a handshake, and the still-silent project manager went off to grab some cardboard boxes and then escorted me to my desk so I could pack up my belongings. I'd actually been aware since last week that something was up, because the project manager had been treating me unusually coolly. Now it was clear why; he'd been distancing himself from me in the same way the farmer distances himself from a cow as the time of its slaughter approaches. We'd been friends, and he hadn't wanted to be too chummy with someone he would be escorting out of the building.
The King of the Lunchroom Court arrived just as we were leaving, and he clearly had no idea what was happening. "Oh, lunch!" I exclaimed cheerfully, maintaining the illusion that nothing was amiss. As we walked out into the parking lot, I made the following observation to the project manager, "This must be a pretty unpleasant part of your job!" That note of empathy seemed to relieve the theatrical coldness, and he agreed, saying, "It's the worst!" As he loaded my box of things into the back of the Bolt, he expressed concern about the Los Angeles client, whose crazy system I'd mastered. He then expressed hope that I really would get the contract work the CEO had mentioned. "Yeah, that would be cool," I agreed.
On the way home, I felt emotionally fragile and a little embarrassed. This was the first time I'd ever been fired for just being too damn lazy and not being able to find it in me to do the work that was expected of me. But I just couldn't do it; the work was just too much of a shit show to engage me. Of course I was also wondering how I would be telling Gretchen.
Back at the house, I cracked open a beer and called Gretchen, who was working at the time at the bookstore. She answered with concern, since I was calling from the house number. "I was fired," I declared. I then explained how sudden it was and how stingy the terms seemed to be. Gretchen was, as expected, outraged about the whole thing. But there was also an element of delight, as she knew I hated the job and didn't like that our schedules were so different (one of the many things that made that job dreary was that the workday began at 7:00am). She wanted to compose a letter in hopes of getting better terms. I didn't really want to go through the additional stress of that, but for the time being we could agree to disagree and she would just be supportive.
I'd drunk one beer and soon cracked open another and proceeded to take Charlotte for an unusually long walk (for me), walking all the way down the Stick Trail to where it meets the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and then heading home on that, ruminating the whole time about today's humiliation.
Back at the house, I drank some booze and emailed now-former colleagues, mostly of the Lunchroom Court (since those were the relationships I'd cultivated). They wrote back and I found myself getting drunkenly teary-eyed. At some point I climbed in the bathtub, where it seems I passed out. I awoke a little after 5:00pm and immediately started making the usual Wednesday spaghetti dinner. Gretchen and I ended up having a nice hour or so together before I went off in the laboratory to do some serious cope drinking. It sucks to be fired, and the loss of that income stream and source of health care is going to cut into our feelings of financial freedom. But we lived for more than a year and a half with me being unemployed, and that didn't stop us from flying to Europe to go on vegan river boat cruises or putting a $25,000 roof on our house. And that was back before we had the additional $2300/month from the Rochester rental. So we're going to be fine. And I'll probably luck into another job eventually, hopefully one considerably less dreary.
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