A rather strange week

It is highly ironic that my last post was something of a lament on it being "funny how life turns out", truer words were rarely spoken, though I did not know it at the time. Last Monday (23rd of November) I arrived at the office as per usual, however stepping out of the lift things were definitely not "usual". The lights were off, desks were dismantled in the hall, whiteboards were off the wall and that was just the start. After entering the main part of the office, I got a bit of a large shock. 80% of the furniture was gone. We had been warned a couple of weeks previously an office move could be a possibility, and it turns out it had happened over the weekend. What soon became apparent is that certain members of staff weren't going to be going along with the company after the move, myself included.

Seeing David (my boss) sorting out his desk down our end of the office at the far end was quite surreal, and the whole thing almost became quite funny in a warped way. Needless to say, he didn't need to tell me we were both out of a job. It soon transpired that it was not just the two of us, all the I.T. staff were gone along with the finance manager. The directors were in a pretty bad financial situation, new investors had come in and were now calling the shots and they had been told to seriously cut costs.

It was no-ones fault, so I don't bear them any ill will. It was (and still is) a shame, nothing more. I think in an awful way knowing it wasn't just me this was happening to made it a lot easier to swallow. Horrible I know, but probably human nature too.

Fast forward a week and two days, and thanks to an excellent recruitment consultant called James Stevens at a company called Omni Resources, I have a brand new job already. It is still in Covent Garden, so I get to stay somewhere I am very fond of. They seem like cool people, a fact which will hopefully be proven very shortly when I start work on Monday (7th December). I get to keep using Drupal, which is another thing that is very important to me as I think its a great piece of technology and want to help to develop the community and platform further any way I can.

In between all that, I got to have a lovely week off with my wife, and catch up on a few jobs that have been put off for weeks/months/years (delete as appropriate, one job was literally about 2 years overdue). Redundancy is not a nice experience, I think mine was more surreal an experience than I have heard from most of my friends who have been through the same thing. I am also very lucky that I have been fortunate enough to stay unemployed for only 2 weeks (by the time I start my new job). Life works in very strange ways.

Enjoy this? Get more or spread the word!