Tuesday morning started poorly.  While working my way through the crowded server room at my office I snagged my favorite Cardinals shirt on a small metal tab.  The resulting "snick" told the whole story.  I had put a hole in yet another shirt.  Frustrating as this was I had no idea how much worse Tuesday could get. After swapping the backup tapes in the server room, and calming down from the shirt "disaster", I got on a support call with one of our sales reps.  Two hours later I had him up and running and I was wading through the myriad of voice mails that had accumulated during the call.  One voice mail was from the VP of Consumer/LCE sales who happened to be in the building that day.  I decided to track him down to solve his issue personally. While snooping around for the VP I was instructed that he might be in the conference room.  Poking my head in the conference room didn't turn up the VP, I later found out he was at lunch, but it did result in a sit down conversation with my boss, the president of the company and the HR manager who all happened to be in the conference room.  If you can't tell by the list of meeting attendee's the result of this meeting did not turn out well. As it turns out my company is merging with another and my position, among many others, is being eliminated.  Everyone who was about to lose their job was being pulled into the conference room one by one to be told the particulars of the decision to merge and the details of their dismissal.  Since I was busy on the phone for the previous two hours I had no idea what was going on.  In my meeting I found out that I am considered instrumental to the merging process and that they would like to keep me on till the bitter end, in this case until December 31st 2008.  The timing is a blessing as many people who are being let go are being given much less notice.  Some as little as 10 days notice. I have been reflecting on this turn of events for a few days and have come to a couple of conclusions.

1. Things like this happen, it is the way of things.
2. In general the people of the US have no idea what hardship is and are not prepared for it.
3. I need to publicly thank God for giving me 10 weeks to search for a new job.

The truth is if you didn't see this move coming at my company then you were blind.  My company, which I would like to keep nameless for propriety's sake, has been for sale for eight years.  Any time you combine or merge companies the duplicate job functions are eliminated.  This is the way business works.  I have known for over a year that my position would be a "duplicate job function" if we ever got sold or merged, but I stayed on in hopes that I could build up a nice work history in my burgeoning IT career before the penny dropped. All that to say I am in the market for an IT job and I will be available January 1st 2008.  You can view my LinkedIn profile here.  You can also submit any job listing for which you feel I would qualify here. As for me?  It is what it is and I need to find a way to make this opportunity work for me and my family.  Now I just need to figure out how. Oh yeah, and thank God I have 10 weeks to look for a job...seriously.  I feel God's hand in this in more ways than one. - Sean