Survior…

When this is all over, I’m going to make a T-Shirt about my experiences. It’s going to have a custom made Survivor: Creek Electric, Inc. logo on it, and “I got voted out of the company, and all I got was this %$@#ing T-Shirt.”, and present it to Lance (and probably end up with one myself.) My side kick and close friend Lance was laid off today. I’m feeling really guilty about it to be honest. I was the guy who vouched him into the company, and we worked pretty closely over the last 3+ years. And today I had to follow The Proceedure – lock out his accounts, change certain passwords, etc. Though I did leave is email one alone.

Paul is next on the hit list – and after what he just pulled, I don’t feel a bit sorry for him. We had a customer complain about one of his jobs. I didn’t know it at the time – was I was asked was to bid what it would cost to build up some drawing books, etc. for a project. Then we added time, and made the process as inefficent as possible. And then added more time. Then da’ boss showed me how much time Paul had put into it – over TWICE what we did with our highly pessimistic estimates. Ouch. This has been getting to be more and more representative of his work. For some reason, the higher echleon decided Paul should stay for a while longer during the last layoff round decisions. I still ain’t sure why.

Heather and I are investigating a new joint venture between the two of us – a serious adventure. For ages, I’ve been looking for a viable profit model for a gaming center – a place that gaming groups can come in and do RPG’s, war games, etc. I kept thinking about renting out tables, etc., but I could never see it working. Heabo and I were talking about the restaraunt portion of the gaming center, and what would be served, etc., and she triggered an idea – I’ve been looking at it all wrong for years now. So we’ve got a possibly viable model for it now. So my next big job is to figure out a full cost listing, and see what it’s going to take money wise to do this. We spent most of the weekend finding places that were for rent or sale that fit our needs, including buying out completely stocked restaraunts that were for sale. The biggest problem is the place needs to be possitively HUGE to pull this off. It presents some very interesting problems that most places wouldn’t have, but nothing insurmountable.

The interesting part is that gives Midnight Ryder Technologies an official home (besides my house) if I wanted to run consulting and such outta there. We don’t have a name for the company that would own the gaming center, or a name for the gaming center yet. Nothing has really germinated for that.

But I’ll say this – I’m damned excited about this idea. It’s been something I’ve been puzzling out for years and have yet to make work. This is the first time on paper that I think it could really work out right – of course, reality has a way of getting in the road from time to time 😉

“The future is wide open…”
— Tom Petty