=4 is my blog.
I changed jobs last October. Someone I used to work with saw an opening coming in his company and invited me to work with him. It's a longer commute but it pays considerably more and is less stress. It was a difficult choice and Flea and I talked a bit about it since I was giving up 14 years at my old job and you never know how a change is going to work out but we decided to go for it.
My old workplace has essentially gone bankrupt in the last month or two. When I left, I had no idea that this was going to happen. Beyond the poor economy for a construction-related industry, the president was (so I heard) embezzling money to pay for gambling debts and cooking the books. He was found out when the owner went to the bank to finance a new home off the company's assets and the bank laughed at him. On December 16th, they let everyone in the residential, design-build and commercial divisions go. I heard last week the owner sold off the maintenance division to a competitor. They weren't interested in the land, building or employees, just the contracts.
I mentioned the estimator here that I replaced before. The 50+ year old woman who talked like Ned Flanders and played strange 80's pop tune electronic dance remixes all day. She decided to get out of the industry all together and was cagey about what she planned to do afterward. I figured it was none of my business and didn't press it but even people she'd worked with here for 9 years didn't know. The other day, I was collecting stuff off the fax and someone sent a release form for her drug/alcohol test results for a bus company. As in school buses. Whether it was her intent to drive school buses or something fell through and she wound up applying to drive school buses, I have no idea. But she's doing that and I'm here and my old company has disintegrated.
Life's a strange thing sometimes.