Housebound

Looks like January's in the bag for this year and not much progress for me.

Job market has been decidedly sluggish until about the last week when several things all came along at once. Of course the big achievement was applying for Jobseekers Allowance (which I've heard I'm going to get).

It seems strange, but I feel I have less time to spare than when I'm working. Despite the fact I hardly emerge from the house on many days, I seem to fill the time up with a combination of (often futile) calls to agents, hunting through job sites and fiddling around on various epics of my own devising. Of course, I haven't mentioned Lego Star Wars, which is also consuming a degree of time, and proving rather compelling.

Motivation seems to go in peaks and troughs, but generally is not as hard to come by as I was expecting. I was starting to wonder how long it would be before I actually landed an interview, but I now have one lined up, albeit in a week's time, which seems like an eternity away. It's not that there are no jobs out there - I see them advertised every day - it's just that people seem to be very, very slow at progressing at the moment, probably hoping that all the doom and gloom of the economy will somehow nurture some small ray of sunshine that can be clung to like flotsam in a shipwreck.

Looks like my annual skiing holiday is off, much to my annoyance.

For some light relief, however, I've actually been and performed a demo for my old company. They are still trying to sell the edifice to someone who'll take it on and do great things. It's a strange situation, but somehow seems about as surreal as the rest of my existence at the moment.

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.

Closed

The inevitable has finally happened.

It's been rather quiet on here recently whilst several things have been going on. But as of yesterday it seems my ailing company is finally locking the doors. I've been given my termination letter.

I've been expecting this since April when the majority of other people left the company, but it is sad for it to finally happen. There are lots of bad things about the place but we were working on a great product and it's sad to see it end this way.

I think the most frustrating part is that the whole enterprise has really failed because the directors lost interest. It seems they can't wait to move on to the next things they have lined up. And overall it seems they aren't losing much money either - which probably explains why they never really fought for the company or really committed themselves to its survival.

So a brief pause for a bit of reflection and then its time to step up my search for the next thing. Not the best time to be looking, but hopefully something will come along - I hope something quite interesting - but will settle for paying the bills. In the meantime I have several ideas and projects that are filling my time, plus some finishing off that needs to be done for my old company.

Surprisingly this is the first time I've been made redundant and only the second time I've left a company at their behest rather than mine (the previous time was the end of a contract which wasn't renewed). Given my liking for small companies, I think this is quite unusual.