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dressed for a firing
Monday, August 2 1999
At work, my team, the "product team," was supposed to have launched something very similar to a brand new Yahoo by yesterday, August 1st. But the only project my bosses had to present for the weekly company meeting was my message boards. All the other big promised things are plagued by "resource shortages" (that is, the lack of waking hours in a week). While I won't be receiving any completion bonus for my work, at least I received some credit at the morning meeting. From the horror stories I've heard, I should count myself lucky for that alone.
I noticed today that the plump, long-haired oddball programmer known as KD was unusually well-dressed. Normally he wears tee-shirts, shorts and sandals, but today he'd actually donned a button-up shirt and sensible shoes. Given that his sole task in the company is to find us a new, reliable mail back-end, I wondered if perhaps he had to make a presentation to an outsource mail system provider. But a little past noon today he visited my desk, Dan the Man (the networking/permissions guy who doubles as Grim Reaper) at his elbow. KD had an unusually sad look in his eyes as he bid me goodbye. He said he'd been fired. He'd been made to gather up his belongings, including a small oriental fountain which used to run continuously beside his workstation. It was complete surprise to me.
In fact, it sort of ruined my day. None of my gossipy engineering colleagues had ever said anything bad about KD at all, so I assumed he was working hard and getting shit done. I wondered if perhaps he had been fired for simply failing to achieve one of our many ridiculously aggressive deadlines. If so, it seemed to me that he'd been set up as a sacrifice to make the rest of us work harder. I was damned if was going to be motivated by such Nazi tactics. Suffice it to say, I didn't stay late like the other poor suckers.
As I was coming home from work, I saw a Skimmer bird plying the waters west of the Sunset Cliffs bridge over the San Diego River. Skimmers are like big terns, but they fly just above the water like pelicans, skimming the surface with their orange beaks and eating any fish they accidentally run into. The one I saw this evening passed back and forth across the same stretch of water, flapping his wings slowly as he went. Until yesterday or the day before, I'd never seen a Skimmer before in my life.
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