Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

One of the pleasures of having a new blog is getting the initial comments meaning someone is bothering to read you.

One comment to this post got me actually laughing, I posted it to the chat room where a few of us former HiWired people hang out. I quote the question here:

I am not finding any other information about them going ‘belly up’. What is the source of your infirmation? (sic)

Considering I was one of the initial techs approached about the pilot program and was involved in it. I took the initial call. I was one of the initial techs hired and worked there the entire time the company was open, posted 1000+ posts on the company blog and was actually still on the phone with a customer when we closed and missed the initial message to shut down so you could say I took the last call too. I’d say I have some solid info.

However David’s question is a lot less funny when you check out google news. The first 5 days I checked every day for news of HiWired or Ctrl-Center or whatever closing and didn’t see a thing and frankly didn’t bother checking after that. But as I check today I STILL don’t see anything on the subject and the phone message as of two days ago suggests a service outage. As Limbaugh would say , zip, zero nada.

Maybe we aren’t a big enough company to matter with all the bad economic stuff going on, its pretty sad to go from the PC Mag editor’s choice to non-existence in the space of a year but you would think it would be mentioned SOMEWHERE.

I can say that the local Office Max had our product sold under their brand off the shelves by the 24th and the local Bj’s pulled it off by the 25th both are near the Unemployment office so I checked them out after I filed.

I still have no idea if the board plans on trying to salvage the name and the existing contracts, if they plan on going Indian, if they plan on selling the name to one of the contracts, if the banks owns the name or someone else. My inside info disappeared when the company did. I would think all of that was still possible, in fact I had wondered if they would simply re-organize and hire us back at a pay cut but I’ve heard nothing. Unfortunately for us but fortunately for the country we didn’t have high powered lobbyists to convince taxpayers to keep us afloat.

So I think it is pretty safe to say we are Kaput, but if anyone knows otherwise I’d be very interested.

Today the wife got paid, with the final check that we got from HiWired and the bi-weekly pay that we had, this will be the last week that a regular normal paycheck will arrive in the house. Next week I will be empty, the week that follows She will be paid and I will get my first unemployment check (baring disaster or success) so that might cover it as normal, but the countdown is on to the “how do we pay the bills?” days.

The good news is my oldest has only 5 more payments on his highschool and I have under a year to go on my car loan. The bad news is college looms and between this and the crash in the markets the college fund and reserve is tanked.

We will see how the countdown goes so far I’ve had one semi interview for a position at 75% of what I was making and no chance for an increase but they haven’t called back. I’m a bit worried now but I’m not going to go into full worry mode till sometime after Christmas. So we will see.

Wish me luck.