ancona
Praying Mantis
Well, we had the "Big Talk" today. We cooked up a sumptuous lunch buffet of salmon [hat tip Admiral], acorn squash with butter, cinnamon and nutmeg, fresh vegetable medley and roasted pineapple, set it all out in the conference room with fresh sweet hawaiian rolls and called everyone in. The Old Man and I sat at opposite ends of the table and everyone else filled the seats on either side of the conference table. We had a wonderful meal and enjoyed a lot of joking and stories for around an hour and a half and everyone seemed to be at relative ease.
Then, the Old Man dropped a bomb. He called everyone to attention and announced that absent a hail mary of some kind during the last five weeks of the federal fiscal fourth quarter, which ends on September 30, we are closing our firm. We have had a truly awful time these last three years and he is no longer willing to bet what amounts to his life savings that it is going to get any better. It has been a perfect storm of additional regulation, new federal requirements regarding contracting and Obamacare that led to this decision. I have known about it for around six months now, but true to my word, I didn't tell a single co-worker, so it was quite the shock for everyone else.
What is truly fucked up is that I am nearly fifty years old, and have worked in the environmental field now for over half of my adult life. This means I will either have to work for those who have been my direct competition for such a long time or go in to a different field altogether. As for some of the other folks who work with/for me [I'm vice president] they are in an even worse position because our field is one of the first ones hit when things get really tight [like now] and things tend to get ignored a lot more when no one has the money to do proper remediation. This means they will be competing for a job in what is argueably the worst job market in our lifetimes and when pay has been stagnant for two decades. The hardest hit will be my junior managers, who will go from making 800 a week to getting 250 a week in unemployment benefits [Florida is among the cheapest of all the states]
As for me, I have thought about it, and then thought about it some more, and still have not come up with a defined plan of action. There are several paths I could take, which involve working for another firm doing similar work, and others which involve going out on my own and startying a consulting firm to do environmental testing, phase I and II site investigations, soil and groundwater testing and remedial design, but that will require me to risk a substantial sum of money. To start such a firm I will need some more certifications, Errors and Omissions insurance, General Liability insurance, relatively expensive equipment and some help. I figure I can get it off the ground for around 75 large, which when looked at from the sidelines is not really that big a deal, but when put in to the context of Mrs. Ancona and Little Ancona becomes a much bigger deal.
The down side to all of this is that all of my plans for the future are now in jeopardy. I have [had] a nice income, a regular set of perks such as a new vehicle every three or four years, free fuel, a huge garden and chicken coop full of producing birds, regular travel, relatively high level security clearances allowing me to see a lot of crazy shit up-close and personal [like the space shuttle, Delta IV and V rockets, the Space-X Falcon and Dragon vehicles, etc.] as well as a raft of intangibles that come from being an executive. I won't lose my credentials, and I will keep my access badges to the Space Center and Patrick AFB, but won't have a job requiring me to be there. I will go from doing client lunches at great local bistro's and restaurants to being some random brown-bag schlump working someone else's mission and at some location other than the current one, which happens to be quite convenient at around 1.1 miles from my house. Although I am not really worried too much, my wife is pretty angry and hurt. She seems to feel sort of betrayed at this point and is taking the whole thing kind of personally. She feels like we have put nearly two decades in to something that should not only have succeeded but thrived and that the Old Man is bailing out prematurely out of greed rather than self-preservation. This man has spent since 1987 building this beast, which is ten years longer than I have been here, and his entire net worth is wrapped up in our operating capital, bond fund and savings account. If he goes another year and we have as hard a time as the last three years, over half of his hard earned money will go away. Our overhead is nearly 25 thousand a month, which is about ten thousand a month lower than 2008 as a result of our belt tightening and cuts, but it just isn't enough, so here we stand.
All of that said, it is a sad testament to the damage done to this country by the Brotherhood of Darkness. The carnage left behind from the crash of '08 will be remembered for some time, with the highlight memory being that NO ONE went to jail. Not a single mother fucker has been prosecuted for wrong doing. The regulatory agencies have allowed hundreds of firms to simply pay a fine without admitting wrong doing and that my friends is simply that. When the second phase of this crisis finally hits, and when the european Union comes apart, the banking world as we know it will cease to exist. Hopefully the phoenix truly does rise from the ashes and we end up with a financial system based upon a gold standard or some othjer hard commodity based standard, because what we have has proven itself to be a failure and is the root cause of most of the ills of this country.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled programing.
I'll keep you updated. Rant over.
Then, the Old Man dropped a bomb. He called everyone to attention and announced that absent a hail mary of some kind during the last five weeks of the federal fiscal fourth quarter, which ends on September 30, we are closing our firm. We have had a truly awful time these last three years and he is no longer willing to bet what amounts to his life savings that it is going to get any better. It has been a perfect storm of additional regulation, new federal requirements regarding contracting and Obamacare that led to this decision. I have known about it for around six months now, but true to my word, I didn't tell a single co-worker, so it was quite the shock for everyone else.
What is truly fucked up is that I am nearly fifty years old, and have worked in the environmental field now for over half of my adult life. This means I will either have to work for those who have been my direct competition for such a long time or go in to a different field altogether. As for some of the other folks who work with/for me [I'm vice president] they are in an even worse position because our field is one of the first ones hit when things get really tight [like now] and things tend to get ignored a lot more when no one has the money to do proper remediation. This means they will be competing for a job in what is argueably the worst job market in our lifetimes and when pay has been stagnant for two decades. The hardest hit will be my junior managers, who will go from making 800 a week to getting 250 a week in unemployment benefits [Florida is among the cheapest of all the states]
As for me, I have thought about it, and then thought about it some more, and still have not come up with a defined plan of action. There are several paths I could take, which involve working for another firm doing similar work, and others which involve going out on my own and startying a consulting firm to do environmental testing, phase I and II site investigations, soil and groundwater testing and remedial design, but that will require me to risk a substantial sum of money. To start such a firm I will need some more certifications, Errors and Omissions insurance, General Liability insurance, relatively expensive equipment and some help. I figure I can get it off the ground for around 75 large, which when looked at from the sidelines is not really that big a deal, but when put in to the context of Mrs. Ancona and Little Ancona becomes a much bigger deal.
The down side to all of this is that all of my plans for the future are now in jeopardy. I have [had] a nice income, a regular set of perks such as a new vehicle every three or four years, free fuel, a huge garden and chicken coop full of producing birds, regular travel, relatively high level security clearances allowing me to see a lot of crazy shit up-close and personal [like the space shuttle, Delta IV and V rockets, the Space-X Falcon and Dragon vehicles, etc.] as well as a raft of intangibles that come from being an executive. I won't lose my credentials, and I will keep my access badges to the Space Center and Patrick AFB, but won't have a job requiring me to be there. I will go from doing client lunches at great local bistro's and restaurants to being some random brown-bag schlump working someone else's mission and at some location other than the current one, which happens to be quite convenient at around 1.1 miles from my house. Although I am not really worried too much, my wife is pretty angry and hurt. She seems to feel sort of betrayed at this point and is taking the whole thing kind of personally. She feels like we have put nearly two decades in to something that should not only have succeeded but thrived and that the Old Man is bailing out prematurely out of greed rather than self-preservation. This man has spent since 1987 building this beast, which is ten years longer than I have been here, and his entire net worth is wrapped up in our operating capital, bond fund and savings account. If he goes another year and we have as hard a time as the last three years, over half of his hard earned money will go away. Our overhead is nearly 25 thousand a month, which is about ten thousand a month lower than 2008 as a result of our belt tightening and cuts, but it just isn't enough, so here we stand.
All of that said, it is a sad testament to the damage done to this country by the Brotherhood of Darkness. The carnage left behind from the crash of '08 will be remembered for some time, with the highlight memory being that NO ONE went to jail. Not a single mother fucker has been prosecuted for wrong doing. The regulatory agencies have allowed hundreds of firms to simply pay a fine without admitting wrong doing and that my friends is simply that. When the second phase of this crisis finally hits, and when the european Union comes apart, the banking world as we know it will cease to exist. Hopefully the phoenix truly does rise from the ashes and we end up with a financial system based upon a gold standard or some othjer hard commodity based standard, because what we have has proven itself to be a failure and is the root cause of most of the ills of this country.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled programing.
I'll keep you updated. Rant over.
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