Three Pronged Attack

So Pete, what's the matter? Got writer's block or what? I mean, it's been a hellofa long time since you've posted. Did life get boring, dude? You suck.

Oh contraire. Life for me lately most resembles an avalanche. Inertia builds as I snip away at my ties to Utah.

I spent Monday morning bawling on the phone to my brother because I had actually gone through with putting Mr Orange on an airplane bound for Detroit. I felt better later that day when my bro picked up the O-man safely, but saying goodbye to what at times felt like my only friend was ... incomprehensible. I miss my kitty; he's a good buddy. I got my daily updates from both the brother and the sister-in-law today. Apparently Mr Orange has already found himself a nighttime spot on the bed. It makes it a lot easier on me if I know he's happy, of course.

Tuesday I hunkered down in the war room with my real estate agent and good friend, R. We played a high stakes game of offer-counteroffer with my house on the line. Fortune smiled on me that day. With two offers, both over my asking price, it was more stressful than you might imagine. When two people are jonesing after your apartment with this much fervor, you can't help but feel bad when you put the big REJECTED stamp on one of them. Sorry baby, your sugar just wasn't sweet enough. Bottom line here: I sold my house. Yay!

Selling the house was one of three events that was to force my hand into moving. The other two were finding a place to live in New York and securing a job. Those other two are in progress. The job hunt is in full swing. Actually, it's past the hunt stage and well into courtship. You know, they are infatuated and I'm getting the sweet goodnight kisses. Unlike with the ladies, I can keep my cool with potential employers, so all indicators are that I will get an offer or two in a week or so.

As for the finding a place to live problem, that's a different story. The reason I haven't been writing here lately is because I've been spending seemingly every last minute doing two things: searching craigslist for housing opportunities and crafting careful emails to potential roommates trying to convince them that at the same time I am interesting/cool/etc. and also that I'm not a serial killer despite the fact that I'm moving to NYC out of the blue. I've got a pretty good formula for it now, but it still takes me about an hour to come up with the proper strategy for one of these cold emails. I'm getting nervous about this one. I've got four days on my upcoming pre-move trip to New York to nail down a place. It's not at all clear to me that I'll be able to pull it off. Oh well, what's the worst that could happen? I might drive into New York with a truck full of shit and nowhere to live. I wouldn't be the first homeless person in New York, right?

So my brilliant three pronged attack game plan seems to be holding up as I enter the final stretch. I've got about two weeks left in SLC, minus the four days I'm in New York. On the agenda for tonight: figure out the guest list for the "Don't let the door hit you in the ass" party being thrown in my honor.

TTFN.

On Chocolate Cake and the Wrong Kind of Popularity

The blog has officially seen more traffic in the last two days than it has ever. Welcome new visitors!

Now get the fuck out. For real, I'm not digging the attention.

Apparently a certain post containing a link to a certain fall-themed website describing the antics of several of people, including a former principle in fly-by-night, has caught the attention of some other people who are concerned with another Utah company that is clearly evil as to not really compare to the generally laughable behavior of fly-by-night. This has sucked in a bunch of new visitors. I feel embarrassed, but not for myself. No, I am embarrassed for them. For god's sake, I literally bear my laundry on this site. For people to come here seeking actual information, that is absurd to the extreme.

I have now had two solicitations to reveal corporate secrets. To all other parties interested in my vast war chest of insider secrets about fly-by-night (because really, as lowly engineer #17 I am privy to all the dirt), please send your inquiries to /dev/null. And for the record, let me state a couple of things:

1. Any and all information contained within this blog should be deemed totally and unequivocally unreliable. Otherwise put, I write with much hyperbole and I generally write when I am too tired to do anything actually productive. Plus it's fun to outright lie sometimes. Example: "I care about you and your concerns about fly-by-night." See, that was funny because, ironically, I could actually not care less about your concerns.
2. I do have a vested interest in fly-by-night's success. Although the ranks have thinned out, those remaining are the best of the best and are also my friends. Fly-by-night is surviving, and will likely rise like the phoenix. So although I do not care one iota about your concerns, I do care about my friends and therefore you should remember: hyperbole is spoken here.
3. Mike Anderer very often has messy hair. Yup, you heard it here first. I'm sure some deep meaning may be derived from that information. Please speculate ad nauseum about that info, it is really important.

Now that that is out of the way, let's get on to the chocolate cake issue. Because of my pending move, I am trying to thin out the pantry. Of the items I have on hand, the Duncan Hines chocolate cake mix with accompanying Duncan Hines chocolate frosting with chocolate chips was the most tempting. Last night, upon checking my refrigerator, I discovered that I had the requisite three eggs required to compose the cake.

Long story short, last night I ate cake and drank red wine with pals; this morning I picked at cake in lieu of eating breakfast; for lunch I packed cake; in the afternoon an unexpected birthday cake found its way to the office -- and I ate it. The unexpected consequence of making so much cake and eating it too is that I really don't feel well at the moment. It's as if my brain is saying "since you have deprived me of every nutrient I need besides short chain carbohydrates, I am going to be weird until you feed me pickles and/or baked beans." Stupid brain, I fed it those baked beans tonight, but thus far the response has fallen short of promise. It is now telling me that getting more than five hours of sleep might be a good idea too. I'm going to try that ... now.

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.

WTF am I doing?

Well I'm in a bit of a stupor. As of late, my days have been filled with activities which I normally do not participate. The infamous employer has still not delivered any of the increasingly massive amount of back pay owed. Because of this situation, I was led to do my first foreign activity: writing my resume.

When I was courted by Fly-by-night, Inc., no resume was ever requested. "Courting" gives the process too much credit. What really happened was that J. invited me to come along with him to meet some people at this company because the needle of his bullshit-o-meter was buried and he wanted some validation from a trusted third-party (me). So I arrived, I met some people, and before I knew it I found myself in the middle of a token interview followed shortly by a job offer from one of the execs where the exec told me that he didn't negotiate salary and that I should just tell him my price. Did I mention they are out of money?

The point here is that I was not even looking for a job; the last time I composed a resume was in the college era. So last week I found myself piecing together the two page description of my professional value that is my resume. I dreaded beginning this process. However, once I got started, I found it fairly easy to put the resume together. A big part of this is that I have to be much less creative with the resume than when I was in college. Back then I was still including the driveway sealing job and probably the dishwasher job. These days, I have more material than I can fit on a couple sheets of eight and a half by eleven. But the real grease for the process was my sheer apathy. At this point in my life, I am so not excited about working for the man again that, frankly, I just did not give a shit about what was on my resume. Ironically, this resume born of apathy is a succinct, valid, and generally good representation of my professional self. Go figure.

Activity number two that I have been participating in is driving around on the highway in the middle of the day. I have been coming and going from the office when I damn well please for my entire career, but what is different now is that I do not care to stay in the office very long. This has put me on I-15 before four o'clock a number of times. So, yeah, it's still just the highway, but I have this lovely feeling like I'm playing hooky and that's kinda neat.

I have also been working from home. Previously, as a general rule, I did not work from home. I did not like working from home and I did not like mixing at-work time with not-at-work time. Because of my new venture, I cannot avoid working from home. I am finding that I was right all along and that I do not prefer working from home. I am also reminded at how annoyingly loving my cat can be. At nearly all times while in my home office, the O-man is pestering me in one way or another. The cat is cuter than sin, but I find myself tossing him on a regular basis when he walks in front of my monitor. What would PETA say?

I am actively reinforcing the professional network. I have been in touch with just about everyone that I used to work with around the valley. I find myself asking everyone I know if they know about any jobs or preferably contract work. The last two nights I've had dinner with two different buddies and former coworkers. I have had the good word put in for me at a couple of places and I've already netted an interview because of this. One might think this networking activity to be soul-sucking or otherwise distasteful. On the contrary, everyone I talk to is either in the same boat or has been in the same boat. We are all seasoned veterans of the computer industry. Because of this shared experience, there seems to be a strong sense of camaraderie that I did not exactly expect. Maybe if the job market was not so plentiful the attitude would be more cutthroat, but at this moment it's one big happy circle-jerk.

Conclusions from all of this? I have yet to get into a groove with managing all this unaccounted time. I have a dozen different possible activities at all times and I find myself switching between each of them quite rapidly. I am a poor multitasker, so I am feeling horribly unproductive. Today as I was trying to remember who I was supposed to meet for dinner and where, I felt for the first time that I understood why someone would want to carry around a goofy-ass PDA.

Oh, and the stupor comes into play because I find myself constantly having to think about what I should be doing at any given moment. This constant questioning of my direction, both in the immediate-term and the long-term, leaves me in a confused, pensive state. I'm sure if I looked in a mirror I would have a WTF look on my face. WTF am I doing?