Funemployment

Apparently my last post is "vague". The backstory is that I was presented with the opporunity to spend 10 days on the Grand Canyon or 21 days. I opted for 10 days over 21 days out of some insane sense of duty and commitment to my job and employer. Said employer laid me off 2 weeks after my return from the Grand. I was lamenting the fact that they didn't have the foresight or mercy to lay me off before my trip so that I could have done the full meal deal.

So I'm done. My third layoff during the holidays in 10 years. What will I do? According to Cameron's amazing voice mail (which will be saved on my phone and listened to if the luster of joblessness starts to fade), "you get to do whatever the f*** you want; dude, you got a hallpass." For now I'm doing a lot of coffee shop sitting, hanging with friends and family, reading back issues of Fast Company, walking, riding, hiking, napping, Yoga, and contemplation. I tried to file for unemployment insurance but there are so many people doing the same thing that the site has been clogged to the point of crawling at rush-hour speed. After waiting 12 minutes for the second page to load I decided to postpone it until some insomniatic night.

If you've been following Western Slope Exile for a while you may remember this quote. "We're outsourcing not only our manufacturing, but our entire economy. And I'm right in the middle of it collecting a pay check off of the whole deal. Sometimes I'm too scared to honestly ask myself if I'm the problem or the solution." Ironic that the funding for my job was created in part by the "savings" from the relocaction of US manufacturing to China....and now one year later that job has been outsourced to China. In my place, in China, there is a director, mold engineer, developer, and and QC inspector (most likely for about the same cost as one of me). I'm all about being "value added" (ick, I almost threw up every time one of my old bosses used that term) but it would be a little difficult for me to offer all of those services, especially all at the same time. I often predicted that development jobs would eventually be outsourced but truly believed that I had at least 5-10 years left. Last July I sat outside the shoe mine on a perfectly sunny day, straining through a particularly uncomfortable, awkward send-off BBQ - watching about 70 of my co-workers get kicked to the curb in the name of "survival"...their jobs sent away 7,000 miles to feed a machine that could, if unchecked, one day consume us. It sucked. If felt like I was going to puke. I felt culpable just by asociation, by the nature of my job...and now I'm on the way to the unemployment office. You play, you pay. The hand that feeds you can be the hand that slaps you.

So what now? Since I was technically outsourced I have access to great government benefits for reloction and education. No bettter time than a recession to go back to school. It's an option. Working is cool too. Eventually. My thoughts include change, sustainability, domestic manufacturing, the blending of the nuts-and-bolts side of project management with identification of product opportunity and creativity, meeting real needs and not perceived needs, positive marketing rather than fear based motivation; remote, lean, and integrated product teams that include not just the typical business unit model (which inlcudes the stereotypical product line manager/narcicist, designer/wanker/primadonna, developer/anti-visionary/calendar janitor) but creaters who can shape shift from napkin sketchers, to supply chain managing activists to caffiene cranked late night spec sheet writers, to guerilla marketers, to sincere advocates of the connection between the sewing machine and the person who buys something and expects it to work, to decent people who don't set aside values for profit, to the saboteurs of the Big-Box distribution channel and healers of specialty retail on main-street.

Love>Fear