My job is evaporating by inches

About two weeks ago the Beetle informed me that the Resolver team in Circulith is going to be allowed to disappear—vacancies would not be backfilled.  Once we are all gone (which may not take much longer; when I hired on two years ago, the team was twenty people; there are four of us left today), the Resolver function will be distributed among the second-level teams in Gemini, Music City, and Heartland.  Within a year or two, I was led to believe, the Auric function in Circulith will be gone altogether—it’s just too expensive to pay the wages that good techs command in Austin.

Circulith has always had its challenges as a call center. Yes, we have the techs who know what they’re doing, but they often don’t have “soft skills” (i.e., customer-relations skills) that make customers the happiest.  Customer response surveys keep showing that they like techs who make them feel good about themselves, regardless of whether the tech actually fixes the issue, to an all-business tech who may be borderline Asperger-spectrum and throws soft skills into the recycling, but who knows the systems inside and out.

So Circulith will be phased out, I think.  Techs who leave won’t be replaced, and when we eventually get to a small enough headcount, the Very Small Remnant1  will either be offered positions on the enterprise (i.e., servers and storage) side of the house, or be let go.

However, things aren’t dire yet.  I haven’t been given a firm date by which I must have a job or be escorted out the door, and I have the Tulip (my ex-boss of whom I think approximately the world) working with me to find something new.  I’m making contact with former co-workers and associates I know who can provide me introductions to people who might soon be needing what I want to do—writing or data mining and analysis; I’m actually talking to some of these people, and they aren’t telling me “g’way, kid, ya botherin’ me.”  Indeed, one of them has already hinted that she’d hire me now if she had an opening (alas, she doesn’t).  So while work-ish things are somewhat depressing, and not helping my spoon count, they could be EVER so much worse at this point.

¹ Isaiah 1:9:  “Except the LORD of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah.”

Hurry the enim to cowsendux.  Fnord.