The Terrifying Bliss of Unemployment

Matt — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 11:25:00 -0400

That’s right, I’m back on the dole! Today is my first official day without a care in the world. No girlfriend, no job, no car payment… I applied for unemployment yesterday and I should be getting enough to cover rent and beer, so I’m golden! Golden!

I got the call yesterday morning. “We’re having a company meeting this morning, can you make it ?” Normally, I am (was!) only in the office on Monday and Friday, so this was a bit of a surprise. Foolish me, I thought they wanted to see the bug tracker presentation I was supposed to give last week. Instead, I got “Matt, you’re a great guy, but your position has just been eliminated.”

Let me throw a little background out there, for those that haven’t heard me wax philosophical about my previous employer. It’s a good group of people – President, head of Marketing, head of Customer Support, and the engineering team (the CTO, a half time contractor, and myself). It’s a software startup with no income yet, being funded by friends and family. The product is reasonably solid, but they haven’t yet converted any trial users.

So from a business perspective, firing the expensive engineer and concentrating on selling a static product makes sense. Mostly. Until there’s a problem that the CTO doesn’t have time for, and the contract guy leaves because he found a full-time gig. Which may never happen, so I can’t really fault their judgement. But I can still laugh hysterically at being told that ‘my position has been eliminated’, since, in essence, that means they’re a software company without an engineering department. Awesome.

All of this comes at an entirely opportune moment for me, since I’m sitting on a wad of cash (what was going to be down payment on a house), I have no girlfriend, and my apartment is a month-to-month lease. For all of my far off friends and acquaintances, you may see me sooner than you had expected!

In addition, there are some conversations that are interesting in hindsight. Like that long talk I had the other night with B. about how I don’t see an inflection point on the horizon. That up until recently, I could always see the next big upheaval in my life (starting Tomo, paying off the car, old friend moving in, old friend moving out, leaving Tomo, going to Asia… there was always something right around the corner). In the last couple months though, I’d been settling in for a period of … peace? boredom? routine? And I wasn’t particularly excited about the prospect.

Well, that’s been cured now.

So what’s next? I don’t know. I’m sitting at one of my favorite cafe’s (used to refer to it as my office, can’t really say that anymore…), with a pad and pen. I’m going to list all the stuff I’d like to do for the next few weeks. Then I’m going to start doing those things.

One of them is to start writing here more consistently. Or at all, for that matter.

One of them is to learn Ruby and Rails, mostly because they’re cool.

One of them is contribute to an open source project, since I use them and evangelize them, but I’ve never really given anything back.

One of them is to update my resume and codetastic.com. I’m thinking the next job will likely be contract work.

One of them is to do some investigation of other countries and how to live/work there. Australia is high on that list. Then again, I could just as easily move to SF or NYC… or not go anywhere.

One thing is for sure – whatever happens, I don’t foresee boredom!

The Mind of Boz: The Terrifying Bliss of Unemployment

The Terrifying Bliss of Unemployment