Narrow Escape

Holy crap. Today it happened. A full nine weeks into the fiasco, the money is flowing again. The president of fly-by-night, acting nearly single-handedly with unfettered stubbornness and irrefutable savvy, was able to convince some poor saps that this flaming zeppelin could be saved if only doused with dollar bills -- millions and millions of dollar bills. Today I got a paycheck. Not the whole shebang, just one hand-signed note. I'm not sure whether to deposit it or frame it for posterity. Okay, I'm probably going to cash it, but still... I mean, this is unprecedented. It is almost as if the company making that god-awful movie yielded some positive karma that is now enabling this climatic Hollywood-style cliffhanger to have this positive conclusion.

Of course, in the movies, after the emotional release following the life or death moment, there is often a following ill-event that comes swiftly and without notice. I have learned a new bit of business jargon recently: cramdown. This is when the creditors or investors have loose their shirts because the value of the company is arbitrarily reduced, or crammed down. Apparently this technique was used to push early investors out of their previous equity positions to allow new investors to gain the lion-share of the company's equity. So, in this post life or death moment, the hammer may drop in the form of some seriously pissed-off investors filing lawsuits against the company. Either that, or the blow will come when one day in the very near future a certain engineer who was one of the remaining four drops the bombshell that he is moving on to another venue.