Well, it’s certainly been a day — of that much, I’m certain.  You can judge what kind of day it was for yourself.

The setup

Most of this past week was spent working from the relative comfort of my futon while I hacked, coughed, shivered, and sweated through some kind of bug — no, NOT the swine flu, thank you.  Today was actually the first day I felt decent enough to head into the office.  Lucky me, huh?

As luck would have it, we were slated to have an early morning meeting to plan out the work for the next few weeks.  We all assembled in the conference room, with large sheets of paper carefully taped to the walls, ready to capture all the scrawls and scratches recapping what we did and planning out what were were about to do.

Then our CEO Steve started speaking, and I knew it wasn’t quite going to be run-of-the mill Friday.

The knockdown

I didn’t have to hear too many words to know this wasn’t going to be good.  When you start hearing “burn rate” and “reduce” in close proximity and delivered with a melancholy tone, you know the axe is going to be falling.  Even though Weplay is gaining a ton of new users (the 150,000 mark was just recently crossed), the advertising market just sucks right now, and things weren’t good enough to keep the staff at its current levels and somehow make it through the year.

We all returned to our desks and waited for our one on one conversations to tell us if we were gone or not.  I was under no delusions:  a contract worker only there for a few months had zero chance of ending up on the right side of the axe blade.  I started cleaning up my desk and the data on my laptop.

The body count was at least 5, counting myself.  Could have been more, but once your number is called, you really don’t hang around too long after that.

The dust off

So just a few hours after leaving my apartment, there I was staring back at the mess I call home.  I laid down for a little while, planning on getting some extra sleep.  But my cold also robbed me of some much needed prep time for the TD Bank Five Boro Bike Tour this Sunday, and Jill did remind me that exercise is helpful in recovering from sickness.  To bury my head in sleep or go out and face the day — what to choose?

I packed my laptop, grabbed my mountain bike, and took a short ride to a riverfront park where I finished my last invoice for Weplay.

Strange enough, this happens to be my sister’s birthday.  It also happens to be the second time I’ve become unemployed on this day.  Yeah…happy birthday, Shannon!

The summary

So a little more than three months have passed and I’m more or less in the same situation I was in before.  Well, at least this time around I don’t have to rebuild my portfolio from scratch.

I wish the remaining Weplay staff all the best.  It’s a great site with a great bunch of people backing it.  As for yours truly, I’ll be back in the saddle before you know it.  In the meantime, if anyone has any web or graphic design work they need done, I’m all ears.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.