I'm Here to Save Your Company

 Since returning from California, life has been filled with constant, unrelenting work, and stress over work. At the beginning of June, we were informed that investors had given thumbs down on giving any more money to the CEO to waste on the six-year experiment that the company is.  We were informed this by a notice that although the most recent paycheck had been sent to our accounts, the money was simply not in the bank to make the next payroll. Effectively it was over.

Dazed from the sundown shutdown, we prepared our resumes and promised to give each other recommendations on LinkedIn. Some of us were in positions to make the transition to unemployment gracefully. Others not so much, especially my direct boss, who has three kids. He had used up much of the family savings before finding this current job. 

I was among the few who kept coming into the office. It was actually a beautiful time because the terror-like grip that management had held over, making us always feel as if we are not doing our jobs properly, suddenly ceased. They needed to be gracious to us.

All this because the one clinic using our system had just "gone live" with our software. Keeping this tinder fire going was the only possibility to save the company. 

I took this as a challenge. I had nothing better to do during the day than go into the office and volunteer to save the company by continuing to do coding work, alongside the front end guy, all while being treated nicely and with the kind of respect of a professional I had not experienced in years.

It took giving up my slack lifestyle and re-entering the hell world of current corporate workplace to understand how bad things have gotten in the country.  The corporate workplace is the sum of dysfunctions of the social media era. LinkedIn is the kingdom of hell (and yet it's the only site where long lost friends have re-established contact by reaching out---something about the workplaceness of it makes it less threatening). 

I was not at all worried about income, because I know God will provide for my needs. It was a joyful duty, to throw my care about this onto the Lord.

Three days later the funding came back. My frontend coworker and I were informed directly the CEO coming into the huge empty backroom (it/' most huge and empty on a normal day). We looked at each other, disappointed that the great three-day adventure was over and things would be back to normal.

Except things were not back to normal. They got more intense, because the CEO was now promising the Moon to the clinic using our software. This is his style to do this, I have been told by ex-coworkers ormer employees--to scuttle a promising trial with a clinic by accelerating the new features, instead of stabilizing the current software, and making it perfect. We are dealing with medical data--of people's kids.

But we have funding "for the foreseeable future" we were told. So I will continue to do my work as if the fate of the company depends on it. I'm very good at what I do. "When they hired me, they didn't know they were hiring the guy that would save the company," I told an ex-coworker at an unoffical happy hour with company alumni.