"Worst recession since the Great Depression."

"Toughest employment market since WWII"

"Half a million new jobless claims this week..."

"Losing Job For First Time Painful Experience..."

I wish I was small enough to gloat, but I'm not.  All over the news the last few months, the dire trumpets of economic disaster have been sounded.  "Americans are struggling," says President-Elect Barack Obama.

With all due respect, Mr. Obama...some of us have always struggled.  Some of us grew up in homes with parents who were self-absorbed, alcoholic, drug-addicted, abusive, or maybe just tinged with that odd European belief system that says that making life easy for your kids is a bad thing.  Some of us couldn't afford to go to college; some of us were told that maybe "school isn't the best place" and "the world needs ditch-diggers, too."  (Lookin' at you here, Dan Baldwin.)

Some of us have been treated all our lives - often because of nothing more than the way we look or because our parents didn't have a lot of money - as though we should be happy to settle for less; we should be grateful to the patrician benchwarmers making 60, 70, 100+ thousand dollars per year for condescending to hire someone with "hair like that" or "skin like that" or "tits."  Some of us have struggled with 2, 3, even 4 jobs at a time while trying to raise children on our own.  

Some people today are figuring out how to live without health insurance.

Others have fond memories of those few brief weeks or months in their lives when they had health insurance.

We've fought thought the scathing condescension of busy-body fat old ladies in welfare offices who have told us "there's no reason you can't get a job, you just don't want to work."  We've fought through the judges ordering us to find employment, but not ordering anyone to hire us.

I'm actually doing fairly decently today.  Not great by any means - I have no security, no 'safety net,' no 'fallback position,' but I've got a little work coming in, and it's keeping me in ramen noodles.  Occasionally I can even throw in some frozen vegetables or a can of Campbell's to help thicken it up.

Since 2001, my total personal income is less than $30,000.

So on one level, I have a lot of sympathy.  I hate the idea of anyone being in the positions I've been in over the years - poverty is so humiliating and embarrassing and depressing.  I can't sit here and gloat; I can only hope that those of you who are, for perhaps the first time in your lives, facing a world that is not particularly friendly and does not particularly give a rat's patoot about your problems can find the support systems and help from friends and family that I've been fortunate enough to enjoy.

And yes, I take responsibility for my own problems.  Nobody forced me to drop out of high school twenty years ago...although I'll grant you, nobody who was supposed to actually give a rip bothered trying to stop me, either.  Nobody forced me to be who I am - and while I've grown and matured over the years, I remain and will always remain a no-nonsense type of person who does not pull punches and is not afraid to say 'this makes no sense to me.'

Unfortunately, that doesn't make me real popular, or real employable.

But I can think of at least two dozen instances over the last twenty years when a company could have saved major cash if the management and supervisory team was less worried about covering their own backside than about what they're supposed to be worried about, which is doing what's best for the organization.  Nortel Networks is a great example.  I worked there in 2000-2001 and spearheaded an inventory control system that saved them well over a million dollars in the course of just a few months, and would have saved much more had it been properly implemente.  I had access to some of their financial systems because of my position, and looking just at the way they managed their IT assets I told anyone who would listen that this company has a serious problem; they don't even know what they own, they've got hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment depreciating in closets, and there is just no possible way that they net assets of the company could be accurately calculated under those conditions.  If, I said, the rest of the company is in this kind of condition, I'm afraid this whole thing is going to come down around our ears in a big hurry.

When I said that, Nortel was trading for upwards of $80 per share.

When I got laid off in December 2001, along with 12,000 other subcontractors, Nortel was trading for two dollars per share.  The only place they saw any savings or improvement was....their IT inventory.  It seems that they'd suddenly found about 800K worth of assets that they didn't know they had - hundreds of 21-25" CRTs stacked up in closets, some of them never taken out of the boxes.  Hundreds of laptops assigned to employees without a shred of documentation.  A lease program with Dell that was costing them money hand over fist because they couldn't keep track of individual machines.

Kinda makes me wonder what I could have accomplished if they'd hired me full time (as they promised to do for the entire 20 months I was there) or had a chance to review and analyze the way they were buying up smaller companies for outrageous amounts of money and then just letting them sit.  Bay Networks is a great example - some of you may remember Bay Networks, they made IT switching equipment and such.  Nortel bought them out...and for at least six months, their destroyed and looted office sat in RTP, with millions of dollars in IT and other physical assets gathering dust.  I'm not sure anyone in the company even knew Bay was there, but it was.  A gorgeous floor of a modern office building in Research Triangle Park, filled with a computer geek's wet dream - dozens of SPARCstations, Sun and IBM enterprise servers, metric buttloads of switches, routers, firewalls, cables.

"Egads," says I. "This is truly a cluster-f*ck of epic proportions!  This wonderful company (and Nortel is a great company in terms of work environment - easily the best job I've ever had, even though I got screwed in the end) is due a major reckoning.  Surely no organization can continue in this condition; sound the alarm.  Get someone's attention.  Let's fix this before we no longer can fix it."

Maybe if they'd listened, they'd not be in the greatlly diminished position they're in today.  But of course they didn't - because hey, I'm just the idiot longhair subcontractor.  I'm expendable; therefore, my ideas and observations must also be expendable.

There are dozens of stories just like that scattered over the course of my career(s).  Where the bloated and superfluous "experts" and "managers" ran a company in to the ground through sheer force of dumb, carefully constructing defeat against all odds from the makings of certain success.  Nortel's still around - they have to be, they're permanently entrenched in about 90% of the global telecom infrastructure - but they're a shell of what they were.

Back in the late 90's and early 2000's - before and after 9-11, indeed, even going back into the late 80's - I railed and ranted about SUVs.  Wasteful, gas-guzzling, enormous steel monsters that the insecure and unskilled were buying up to give them a sense of false security in the face of their own lack of driving ability, says I.  Nobody needs one of these gas-hogs to drive ten miles to work every day, says I.  Get something fuel efficient and small, I said, or at least a family car.  Stop with this onstenatious display of wealth - I'm not impressed with how big your truck is or how much chrome it has on it, and you shouldn't be either.  Shame on you, said I - you are contributing to our dependence on foreign oil and the ongoing degradation of our environment.

I was, of course, pilloried.  How DARE I suggest that AMERICANS should not DRIVE WHAT THEY WANT?  It's MYYYYYY RIGHTS!  It's MYYYY MONEY AND I'LL SPEND IT MYYYYY WAY!  You should just stop WHINING because you're a BROKE, UNEMPLOYABLE LONGHAIRED HIPPIE FREAK and you're JEALOUS that you CAN'T AFFORD and SUV.

And ten year later here we sit...and now NOBODY can afford an SUV, and my point of view has become mainstream.  You'll note, for the record, that not one of the execrable tools who flung the above epithets and much worse my way have stepped forward to apologize.  Hell, some of them are still insisting that it's their "right" to drive what they want.  And it is...but brother your rights don't mean a damned thing when the rubber hits the road.  We saw a glimpse over the summer of what your tenacious insistence on your "right" to drive what you want will get you, and get all of us...and you know what really sucks?  I had to pay $4.50 a gallon for gas just like the idiots who have helped create this situation did.  

I kinda resent that, ya know?  It kinda grates on me that if people had listened to what I was saying ten, twenty years ago we wouldn't be in this mess, and it grates even more that I and others like me, who have worked hard and made every effort to avoid being 'part of the problem' now have to suffer the consequences of the material obsession and self-importance of others.

I sound like a damn US Senator, all self-righteous and self-aggrandizing, and I really don't mean to.  The point I'm trying to make is that maybe - just maybe - some of you folks who are finding yourselves unemployed, without health insurance, wondering where your next SUV payment or afternoon at the day spa is going to come from, might take some of your newly-expanded leisure time and consider:

Your degrees and "expertise" didn't save your butt...but if you're in management, it's at worst a 50-50 shot that there's something you could have done - and refused to do, most likely because it would show flaws in one of your own pet projects - that would have saved not only your job, but the jobs of others who worked for you.  I don't know how many times over the years I've heard managers and business owners shoot down good ideas or quality, realistic assessments because they didn't want to hear it, didn't want to take responsibility for it, or had a vested interest in keeping their failures in the dark.  Self-interest and self-aggrandizement...those are the real roots of our current financial problems.  I'm the last guy in the world to go around defending big business - indeed, 'big business' itself bears much of the responsibility for becoming an "old boys' club" where what you know is less important than who you know.  

The point I'm trying to make is that maybe - just maybe - if those of you who find yourself gifted with an unexpected excess of free time take an honest look at yourselves and the decisions you've made over the years, you might - if you're strong enough, if you've got the guts, if you can take the hit to your ego - avoid making those mistakes in the future, should you ever again have a chance to make them.

You have my sympathy.  I wouldn't wish my financial situation on my worst enemy, and there are lots of folks out there in worse shape than I am.  And I'm sure that not everyone who is facing a layoff this month is a manager; indeed, some of you may be just like me, trying your best to get someone's attention when the sky starts sagging, rather than waiting until it falls and blaming someone else.  And now you've got to eat dirt because nobody listened.

But some of you...well, I don't mince words well, so I'll just say it outright:  some of you are part of the problem.  

Take that into consideration when you start your next job, and maybe when we finally start a recovery, we can sustain it this time.

In the mean time, enjoy your stay here in the land of the "have-nots."  Count yourself fortunate that you're almost certainly just visiting - if you think a couple of weeks or months of this crap sucks, try doing it for 5, 10, 15 years.  Try doing it all your life.  Maybe if you think hard about it, you'll be a little less self-concerned and a little more charitable when you're in the black again; maybe if you think hard about it, you'll use whatever stroke you manage to get in your next position to stand for what's right and healthiest for your company, rather than what's most likely to cover your butt and advance your own career at the expense of others.

That's my bitter, pissed-off little rant about unemployment and poverty.  My next few articles will be of a more useful nature - namely, I'm going to share some of the tricks and tips that have helped me get by over the years during tough times.  I suspect there are a lot more folks out there right now who could make use of that information than there were two years ago.

Maybe this time, you'll listen?