The first bit of news I received when I got to work yesterday was that a friend and co-worker (and my cubicle neighbor) was t-boned by a car while riding his motorcycle the day before. Initial reports were that he had suffered a broken leg but later reports were that x-rays and an MRI showed no broken bones but deep bruising. He was at home yesterday and is expected to be back at work tomorrow. The bike is totaled but it could have been much worse. He’s had an incredibly bad year, so far. Last October he and his wife split up and the divorce was final earlier this year. I had gone to help him pack her moving truck to move her back to Florida, while driving down to Florida her dog suffered heat stroke in the car and died. Then he found he owed quite a bit of income tax due to the way the assets were divided in the divorce. A month ago he had driven to the Charlotte airport for a business trip, on his way home his Porsche spun a rod bearing and it’s still in the shop in Charlotte. Last I heard the total bill for the rebuild was in the range of $9000 dollars (and no, I didn’t miss a decimal point)! The motorcycle was his only operable vehicle and it was totaled in the crash.
I also received news yesterday that there is some reorganization of projects in my group. We were looking to add a new engineer, my manager had even been interviewing candidates but yesterday we learned that a hiring freeze had been put into place and rather than getting more help we would be redividing the projects between groups to better balance out the effort. One of the projects that I was the lead on, and a couple of things I was supporting were given to another group whose workload had declined this year. That will give me the chance to focus more heavily on muzzle devices which is the bulk of my group’s work for the rest of the year. |
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