I don’t talk much about work here for several reasons but I’m going to do so for a little bit. Friday was my last day at my now former job. I worked at a semiconductor fab near where I live which closed. There are a lot of reasons for the closure and most people who worked there have different mental pictures of the events and conditions that lead to the decision to close. I don’t really want to get into that but, much like most things, there is no single thing responsible. I ended up being one of the last people there since I became the manager of the IT group in the last year when my friend who had had that job as one of his many duties left to take a pretty fantastic position at Sun Power (solar company). So, we shut down the fab, cleaned up the equipment and then my group organized and dealt with the computers, servers and network hardware. I think we did a good job and I hope the few remaining people don’t have too much extra to do that I wasn’t able to get done.
This was my first job out of college and for a few years I was not very happy with it. I couldn’t say why now. I had less work and responsibility than I ended up with at the end and I was fortunate to not only get a job quickly after graduating but to then survive the several rounds of layoffs caused by the post dot-com bubble correction. I liked the vast majority of the people I worked with and towards the end I came to feel that had we not closed I could have worked there for the rest of my life. Still, eight years is a pretty good run at a job these days so while I’m sad I am also proud of the work that we did and of my contribution.
I’m going to spend the next week and a half going through some of my old textbooks (I used to know some math once upon a time sigh) and work on an application to a company some of my friends work at and seem to like. Then I’m going to go on a ski trip with some other friends which should be fun. It’s been 15 years since I’ve been skiing and I’m going to try the snowboarding this time so it’ll be an adventure. That reminds me, I need to buy the lessons and lift tickets today. Anyway, it’s not a great time to be looking for a job but I have some savings which means I have some time and, as has been pointed out by many people, how often do you have a lot of time off where you can do whatever you want. In fact several of them suggested I go to Japan like I’ve been wanting to for a while but that’s a little more than I’m willing to spend without an actual income.
I suppose that’s it. I’d like to think that having more free time will cause me to post more but I doubt it. Wish me luck.