This is about three weeks overdue.
Three weeks ago, on a Monday, I was laid off from Interactivate, Inc. I had worked there six months. Right before the holidays, San Diego Corporate decided to close the Boulder office. It wasn’t as though it was unexpected; we had seen it coming for weeks. But we did think they would wait and let us take our paid holiday time and… well, you know, have Christmas.
I was given a week’s severance, in exchange for which I had to sign an agreement not to sue them. They offered to let me work as a contractor, but with no guarantee of work. Fortunately, the good folks who assign the work in San Diego have kept me afloat with enough to do for the last couple of weeks that I’ve been able to maintain relative peace of mind.
But enough about Corporate. I’m here to tell you about the guys in Boulder.
When I interviewed for this job, after a grueling round of technical questions, an examination of my most recent project on the whiteboard and a list of questions designed to test my knowledge of English grammar and punctuation, there came the lightning round. I was posed such queries as, “Tell me a joke.” “What is the average flight speed of an unladen swallow?” “How do you get rid of a ship full of tribbles?” “What does Trogdar burninate?” and, most tellingly, “If you were stranded on a desert island, what album would you want to have with you?” Note, they asked “album.” As in vinyl. I answered with Stevie Wonder’s “InnerVisions,” which I had recently been playing, incessantly, on my brand-new-used turntable. I got the job.
I ‘m sure the joke helped. Well, actually, I got only average points on the joke, but full marks on delivery. I used a voice. The joke was one my brother told me when I was a kid, and, being put on the spot, it was all I could remember. The “Baby Big Mouth Frog” joke. No, I’m not going to tell it here. It needs The Voice.
Suddenly, I was no longer a big fish in a little pond. The pond was still small – there were only six people in our office – but every one of them was hand-picked and Extremely Good At What They Did. I was able to talk tech constantly with my co-workers instead of having to explain, in kindergarten language, what it was that I did (or could do, for the company, if my manager would simply get out of my way). We bantered across the office, shouting comments and questions over the walls. We pulled each other into technical conversations to work out some knotty problem on the whiteboard, jumped in to help on each other’s projects when needed, and shared knowledge constantly. Ok, I was the recipient of the knowledge most of the time. I was the new guy. But what a joyous and fortunate thing, to be in such a high-speed learning environment, challenged constantly, expected to improve, and driven to do well, be thorough, and excel in everything I did. Oh, and there were the odd (very odd) links that were instant-messaged around the office from time to time when someone had found something particularly bizarre to share. Followed by laughter. And talk. And distraction from work. And more laughter. Finally, we got back to it. But those breaks were good.
And, there was Pool.
My second day, we all went out to lunch, to a place called “The Attic” in Boulder, where, way in the back, there are free pool tables. I was told that whether or not I learned anything about programming at this job, I would definitely become a better pool player.
They were right. For six months I labored to beat any one of them fairly at a pool game. I won a few times, but only because someone scratched or I got lucky and hit the 8 ball in on the break. Frankly, I sucked. But I watched and learned. I asked questions, and eventually stopped trying to win. I concentrated on my bridge, on following through, on hitting the ball straight into the hole instead of watching it go off at some weird angle because I didn’t maintain control. I learned how eating a burger affected my game, and learned to hold off until I was well into it and had had some time to develop my concentration. I got pretty good at The Leave – if I couldn’t sink anything, I could at least make it so my opponent had no shot. Some of those were very satisfying.
Then, of course, there was Calvinball.
For those of you unfamiliar, the reference is to the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” in which, from time to time, Calvin and his pet tiger would play games that had constantly changing, ever-shifting bizarre rules. On certain days of the week – Wednesday, I think, or maybe it was Tuesday – pool turned into Calvinball. After every win, you were allowed to make a new rule. Cluck like a chicken before every shot or forfeit your turn. Or shoot with your eyes closed. Stand on one leg. Use the pinky bridge. Call your shot and do at least one fancy-schmancy thing that makes the crowd go “Aaaah.”
These rules accumulated through the lunch hour. That was part of the point. After a while, it got so you couldn’t remember which rules you were following. There were veto rules. And rules for vetoing vetoes. Rules that were made on the fly to sound convincing, as though they were holy writ based on precedent from over six weeks ago. And sometimes they were. Convincing. Somewhere, somebody was keeping a tally of points for that sort of thing. We just didn’t know who.
Once, before the end, before we knew for certain that they were going to axe us, I beat Mike. Mike was the acknowledged best player in the office, obsessive enough to carry around a tool to rough up the end of the cue stick on his keychain. Mike was a little put off, but it was a good day for me. I had been taking cues from Mike for weeks, asking questions and observing his game, trying to absorb all that he knew. Finally, it paid off. Maybe, maybe he was having a bad day. Not quite on his game. I didn’t care. I had won. Six months of effort and I finally had the satisfaction of sinking the 8 ball at the end.
Then the hammer fell.
We had known, for a while, that it was coming. We had hoped it wouldn’t, but none of really believed it. It had started when Derek, third or fourth employee of the company, Director of Operations and manager of our office, was fired without a moment’s notice. There were reasons given, financial and otherwise, but it came down to the fact that there were lots of changes going on at the company that we weren’t too particularly comfortable with. Suddenly, our isolated little castle was having its moat filled in and the drawbridge lowered. We fought to keep ourselves insulated from the corporate politics and differing management practices of the non-application-development wing of the company (everyone that was not us), and succeeded, for a while. But the writing was on the wall. We had assurances from San Diego that they were going to support us, and they might have followed through, had the rest of the office remained intact. But getting rid of a good manager is a bad thing to do.
Dan and John decided they had had enough, and went looking for other work. They found it pretty quickly and were both snatched up by the same company. As two of the anchor employees of the application development office, it left us looking at a pretty big hole. As soon as notice was given, one of the VPs flew out from the San Diego office to tell the rest of us that we were out of a job. Domenic and I hadn’t been quick enough to land new work before the company was able to fire us, so it came as a bit of a shock. Not a huge one, but still.
That evening, we all went out for drinks. Derek joined us. We went to the Attic. We played pool.
It was a celebration of the fact that we were all together, one last time, laughing and joking, enjoying ourselves, and frankly, getting plastered. The calvinball rules ran thick and heavy. The beer flowed. The games became raucous and loud and the cue ball flew off the table into the wall at least twice. We toasted the barman who had served us all so well for so long. By the end of the evening we were speaking in thick Scottish brogues, and no one could remember whose turn it was.
It was a bittersweet ending to a spectacularly good few months. In retrospect, all that time I spent grousing about this or that detail of my life and how I needed to be making more and doing more were couched in a net of safety, an environment where excellence was encouraged and intelligence was simply the norm, where the people I worked with were universally supportive and well-versed in having fun. I considered Interactivate to be a form of “school” the whole time I was there. I intended to learn as much as I could about programming when I started there, and that I did. But unexpectedly, I also learned about what it is like to work with a great bunch of people, and how important that is to one’s outlook on life. I learned a good deal about pool. And calvinball. And not taking oneself too seriously.
I also learned to call shotgun the second I’m out the door, and to defend my claim against any and all comers who would try and convince me that whistling a two-step while walking backwards amounts to a superior right to sit in the passenger seat.
Mostly, it’s whoever gets there first.
