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acquired
Friday, October 19 2018
I had to scrape frost off the windows of the Subaru this morning, making this the first frost of the season. Happily, I'd brought in the two transportable plants that could've died in that cold: a spider plant and an African black-eyed susan vine.
It was a relaxed day in the workplace. John, a young developer working for my employer for the past four or five years, is getting a job in Boston and will be moving there in only a few days. Since he'd built a lot of good stuff for the company and been a great employee, his departure was to be an honorable. Today as part of the sendoff, the head honcho took us all to lunch at an Italian restaurant just south of Red Hook called Savona's. It has a beautiful bar beneath towering cathedral ceilings, though the ten of us sat at a big table in a side dining room. The menu wasn't particularly friendly to people with my dietary habits, but they had a veggie burger that came with fries, so I ordered that. Since others at the table were ordering beers, hell, I ordered one too. I went with an IPA that had been flavored some sort of fruit juice (it was okay but not really my thing; the alternative was Sierra Nevada, and I wanted to try something new). I sat at the end of the table between my immediate boss and a slightly aspergery support guy for an older software product. He'd recently been to Romania, so I struck up a conversation with him about that, and it turned out he mostly was interested in the place because past and/or current girlfriends were from there. Other brief conversations concerned how fast we'd managed to drive cars in our lives (the fastest I'd ever gone was about 100 mph downhill in my old Dodge Dart, though my boss claims to have hit 160) and the saga of Theranos (especially my obsession therewith). The burger and fries were better than expected.
After lunch, we had a company meeting up in the upstairs conference room. I'd been working here more than six weeks and this was the first meeting I'd ever been invited to. (Contrast that with Mercy For Animals, where it wasn't uncommon to have three meetings in a day. Of course, at Mercy For Animals, when the company was paying for lunch, nobody ever ordered beer.) The meeting was for the head honcho to make the announcement that our humble little software development shop had been bought by a "private equity" conglomerate based in eastern Tennessee. We were told to view this change as a good one. We'd have better health insurance, better benefits, and there would be money to hire new people. This was, it was explained, in contrast to other types of acquisitions, where the plan is to strip mine the acquired companies of anything of value and then cut the workforce to the bone. One final thing about the merger: all of us employees (with the exception of the soon-to-depart John) would be getting shares in the parent company. Since none of these entities would ever be publicly-traded, these wouldn't technically be stock. But they would have some value that could be expected to grow along with the parent company.
After that news, we were all feeling kind of upbeat. The head honcho had suggested we "clean" the office, which is something that we employees do, since we haven't been able to find a cleaning service that "doesn't throw away our stuff." And then it was decided we could all leave early, so people just started leaving. I was in the middle of babysitting a Python script that was spidering attachments off of various servers, and I thought I should babysit it. But when I realized it would take hours to complete, I left as well. I stopped at the Stewart's on the south end of Red Hook to get me a drive-time IPA to celebrate.
Back at the house, I gathered dry firewood from the nearby forest to continue building up the ready-to-burn supply in the living room. Experience tells me I can put about 800 pounds of wood in the living room firewood rack, which is about 20% of a cord (or enough to heat the house for about a week during peak heating season). At this time of year, the firewood burn rate tends to be much lower.
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