Near the end of 2001, I found myself laid off, standing on the street corner with my personal computer and a box of my belongings at my side.
For most people, this probably would have been a traumatic moment in their lives. For myself though, I had know this had been coming, so it felt like a final release of the tension and frustration that had been building up for close to a year.
That’s because the web firm I had been working for, had been making one bad decision after another. And with the dot-com bubble imploding all around us and sucking all of the projects and accompanying funds with it, it became apparent that the company was imploding itself, as our pay cheques were often repeatedly delayed each pay period.
So when the time came and I was called into the office of the two owners of the company at the end of the day, I actually chuckled and told them I was expecting it, when they announced they were laying me off.
I chucked because in my head, I had this fantasy that I would go freelance and create the sites and assist the customers I always wanted. Little did I know at the time that I was in for a rude awakening.
You see within a few months after being laid off it became pretty clear that budgets for web projects, even smaller ones which I thought I could still get, were pretty much non-existent now.
So all of the bravado I had had quickly evaporated and I became even more angry and frustrated than before. Not at the company I had worked for though but for the entire way “work” conventionally worked as a concept.
I had had enough. I had pretty much foreseen the whole buildup to the dot-com bubble, when companies were going crazy trying to go public and offering nothing more substantial than just hype.
It was just egotistical beyond belief.
I remember our own company even going public and the two owners offered me stock options and I really didn’t care because I knew that they would be worthless.
What mattered and had meaning to me, were our customers, the relationships we built with them, and the sites we created for them that helped relayed their identity and brands.
As the months passed by without finding any work, I became even more toxic, sharing my story with anyone who would listen, as I saw more and more people laid off and treated like disposable objects rather than as human beings.
Even I felt worthless and without value because I couldn’t really utilize the skills I had a mastered which had enabled me to achieve a senior position in the past. Now finding work to match my skills and experience was pretty much impossible, so I looked for odd jobs and was fortunate to find one through a friend who had also worked at the same web firm as I had.
As my friend had said at the time, sometimes you have to eat humble pie and take what you can get. But I actually enjoyed the physical work of this new job, working for a vintage furniture shop, and I no longer felt like a dead weight in my relationship with my wife, as I could financially contribute once again.
Little did I know that shortly my life would change dramatically once again, this time for the better though.
You see while walking around a book store one day, I came across a copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto and my entire outlook on life changed.
And you might as well hoot as cry about it. It’s not the end of the world. It’s the beginning of a new one. What’s emerging is our story in the most fundamental sense, the human mythos weaving a vision of whatever it wants to become. There is no known deterrent. Take a deep breath, baby. Roll with it.
The Cluetrain Manifesto
This book was like a Monty Python’s Hand of God pointing down from the sky, highlighting the very frustrating things I had experienced within the work world.
With this book, I no longer felt alone.
I felt like there was an army of people out there who were all frustrated and fed up with the conventional way work wasn’t working and they truly believed that there was a better way.
They just needed to find it.
And so in questioning my assumptions and beliefs around the concept of work, so began my quest.
All knowing begins with a question. And a question begins with a “quest” (to state the obvious), as does life.
Beau Lotto
Deviate