Era ended

Today was (hopefully) my last day in the office.

I say hopefully because my boss has been hedging his bets a bit and has refused to take the office keys off me - but I've finished the tasks stipulated on my termination letter.

I've spent the last few days not only pulling all of the last 2 years work into one place, but also having a go at cleaning out some of the junk in the office. Given that the company is (probably) winding up - pretty much everything is junk, especially all the products we spent the last 2 years struggling to put together.

In a way it is quite sad, and I do feel some pangs of regret, but in many ways I am glad it's at an end. The last year has been difficult and I've had to deal with taking the blame for all kinds of things, a witch hunt against me, some rather unprofessional antics by both my bosses and team and also the continued and persistent playground politics of the directors.

I still feel that we did a good job, against all the odds, and produced something which, under different circumstances with a different company, could have been a nice little product selling into a niche market. We were never going to be huge, but I think we could all have made a good living and had fun doing it - however it was not to be.

Ironically, healthcare is probably one of the few sectors which will weather this downturn quite well. But that's all behind me now.

Being so close to Christmas, the job market is very sluggish at the moment. With the added uncertainties of financial meltdown it's proving very difficult to find a job which doesn't just disappear overnight - I've had a number of really good looking prospects which suddenly cease to exist - so I suspect it will be the new year before anything concrete comes along.

I've got a number of ideas for projects and products but it is difficult to get the motivation to really drive them forward - I also don't have the money to finance them myself - but perhaps I will tinker around with a few ideas and see where we go. I don't need to desperately find a job imediately, but some form of income is going to be essential in the not too distant future. It's interesting to consider this may be a crossroads in my life, or it may just be a little blip which is soon forgotten - only time will tell which.