Oh, no way. It was a gift from the get-go. The only problem was I started drinking a lot in relief.
What happened was around 1987 there was a corporate raider who decimated the Singer Corporation. The Singer Sewing Company that is alive today, I guess, was a spinoff. This raider eventually went to jail and Singer was sold off in bits and pieces.
Well, the Kearfott Division (which was gyroscopes, Inertial Navigation Units, high-end techno-sh*t) went to a rag-tag outfit in Minneapolis or Milwaukee. Cannot recall which. Astroscope, or some other such name. Ridiculous company.
From the day they bought anyone with any sense wanted out of Kearfott. Well, my dilemma was that I had just changed careers within the organization. I was an Industrial Engineering Supervisor and now I was a Telecom "Manager". Still a Supervisor, technically, but with the managerial duties. Had a 4 million dollar a year budget.
Now I liked Telecom, but had limited experience. I could have gone into Engineering elsewhere. I decided to stick with Telecom there until I had more experience. By 1991 I had driven the budget down to about $675,000 a year. This may be the real reason why I was RIFed, but whatever.
Working there those last 4 years was a Nightmare from Elm Street. The people from Milwaukee were total jerks. Fish out of water. They took a company that had a lot of high-priced talent and converted it to a company with low-priced talent. Trouble was, the product sold for a high-priced talent number. Once they got rid of the high end people, well....
For example. The guidance systems are the brains of
The M-1 tank that has a gun that levels itself as it travels over rough terrain.
The satellites that focus on terrain on distant planets.
Missiles that go down through small openings (as during the Gulf War). I do not recall if Tomahawks were amongst those, but that's the idea. Guided missiles in general, basically.
The Stealth Missile. (The reason I spent a hell of a lot of time in San Diego instead of with my wife and family in the mid-1980s.)
Many more. When I started there, Kearfott's guidance equipment could line up a pumpkin in a window in the Empire State Building from Wayne, NJ, about fifteen or twenty miles away. By the time I left the technology had it down to nailing an orange at the same distance.
Now they wanted to replace these people who developed such technology with people who worked for minimum wage by comparison.
Total idiots. I was happy the moment they let me go. Took me a few months to slow down on the drinking, of course. I mean I had just gone from being in Hell to a total mental release....except I had no future in the job market.
But no, I knew it was a Gift From God right from that very moment.
------------
Sorry for the Rant. You cannot imagine the flood of bad memories that just poured out in my head. |
