Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

One of the problems when a company closes down without warning is the fear it produces.

Yesterday in the still active chat room where company members sit it was mentioned that one of our co-workers paychecks bounced.

This produced a bunch of worry since that meant that some bills would have to wait a while as Massachusetts has you wait three weeks before you can start to collect, (my first collection won’t be till 12/19).

Lucky for us there is a thing called e-mail and the person in question replied that the check in question was an old one that is even now resolved for deposit on Monday.

I have yet to hear of anyone getting a new job yet. It has only been 10 days as of this morning but it would be really nice to hear that somebody found something of comparable pay.

Anyway later this morning is the first “call in the claim” day. Sometime after mass I’ll call in to let them know I don’t have anything yet. Last time I was laid off (also when a location totally closed) it was nearly 6 months before I found something permanent, I sure hope it doesn’t take that long this time.

Well There are likely a few people who are wondering what the h*** actually happened to HiWired, Control Center (Ctrl-Center), Windstream Tech Support, Comcast Tech support etc… and all the other supports that we did over at HiWired.

Being a lowly tech I don’t have all the story but I’ll give you what I can.

In terms of what our main problem is I think it was tactical. I think we tried to grow staff first in anticipation of growth rather than increase staff as needs allowed, I think our own success gave us hubris.

In terms of the end A lot of things seemed to happen while I was gone:

Our first round of layoffs took place while my wife and I were in Bermuda it cost us managers mostly.

The second round of layoffs took play on my day off that cut a fair amount of techs and staff including some really solid ones and some dear friends.

A new CEO was put over the founders and presumably he was attempting to manage us into survivability. We had solid contracts. Office Max’s Ctrl-Center being the largest, but if you had tech support through Windstream, Bj’s, and some parts of Comcast and others you were dealing with us in Boston.

It was our impression that we were good until after Christmas, personally I presumed that since our service was good, (a PC Magazine’s Editor’s choice) that they might choose to take us over directly, however last Friday in the middle of the shift we were abruptly told that the company was over and that we were all discharged, top to bottom.

I actually missed it as I was deep into a customer problem, I got an IM from a co-worker saying it was nice to have worked with me, when I asked her if she found a new job she forwarded the into to me.

To the best of my knowledge the bank owns the name now, I don’t know if they will sell it to some other company or what but since the local Bj’s and Office Max pulled the named products off I’m figuring the name’s values isn’t what it would have been a week ago, and in the end we the techs were the product sold.

Whats up for us now? Who knows? We will see.