Back and Attacked

Well, I’m back from Colorado. It was a great time. You can see the photos here. Sorry, but I’ve had no time to add commentary to the photo pages. Highlights included seeing my first game in our new seats at the New Mile High (I will NEVER call it *******), my sister’s birthday party and just generally seeing my family—especially my grandma, who suffered an injury in August.

On another note, I returned to find an email from my employer’s Human Resources department concerning a mandatory meeting with the president of our operating company to take place on the following day. Well, the expected happened. They announced that our group is “in scope” for a “study” by one of our “vendors” for a possible sourcing arrangement.

What this means is that on the best case scenario, everything will remain the same. In the worst case, we’ll gat laid off. But the most likely scenario is that the functions of my job (which sort of hover somewhere between design and operations) will move to another area—either a different division of my company or the outsourcing vendor (who shall remain nameless but is the biggest outsourcing vendor and has three initials that aren’t I.B.M and has ads about herding cats).

This isn’t necessarily bad news, but it certainly has changed my attitude about my job. I don’t have a bad attitude: just no attitude. Everyone is behaving in the same fashion as well, so it’s not just me.

My best course is to remain professional and see what happens. It may be an excellent opportunity for salary renegotiation and/or a chance to cut myself free of the whole business—and I MEAN THAT! You see, lately we’ve been thinking.

Imagine this: you are young, married, have a house payment, a couple cars, some assets, a tiny bit of debt. You are basically on the road to Yuppiedom in possibly negative sense of the word—meaning that you are about to get hooked into the consumption machine. You know, like a paraphrase of the whole “Just Say No”-era anti-cocaine ads: I work hard, so I can make more money, so I can get more stuff…

Now imagine this: you made a couple of smart investment decisions, a couple of dumb ones. But your wife made an incredibly SMART one in real estate that basically allows you to live in a very valuable house and pay very little for it. Now, there’s a lot of money tied up in this house—a lot of it EQUITY. What if you take that equity, buy a house for cash, free yourself of debt and start anew?

What if you had NO PAYMENTS TO MAKE?

Well, what would you do? Would you pursue a new line of work? Start a coffee shop? A record store? Go back to college? Start a business? Volunteer more? Travel more? Spend more time with your family? Have children?

These are options for us. We have the potential power to take control of our lives and unhook from the corporate culture to a certain extent. I’m not saying we don’t want to work and pay bills and make money. I’m just saying that we want to put money to work for us and not work only for money.