Almost all of the companies I have worked for have gone out of business or have been absorbed into other companies. This has been going on for the last 30 years. I feel like I am a jinx.
The first little job I had was small variety store. I worked there for just one day and realized that retail was not my thing. Although the store was in business for many years after that one day, it finally went out of business.
The next job was working at a distribution center for a major clothing store. What the distribution center did was to receive in the shipments of clothes from China, India and other countries, repackage them into smaller shipments and send them out to the stores. I worked there for 6 months then was laid off with many others. The company went under about a year later.
The third company was a small solar company that made solar controllers. I worked there for a year and
a half when the owner of the company decided he wanted to move the company from Menlo Park to Sacramento, CA. I was laid off and the company moved. It promptly went under right after the move.
The next company that hired me and go out of business was the Bullocks department store chain. I worked in their corporate offices in Menlo Park, just around the corner from where the solar company use to be. I worked there for 6 months and then found out that another major retail chain was covering the company's payroll. It was time to move on and I did. I found another job. Bullocks was absorbed into Federated Department stores shortly after that. The place I worked at was moved to southern California. I think that they finally went out of business.
Next was an electronics company that was a division of a larger company. I worked there for a few years and then the division was sold to a company that had its headquarters in Cleveland. The problem with that is the fact that most companies that are located on the east coast like to operate all of their company locations like they are in the east. That often does not work very well for company locations that are in Silicon Valley. They got cheap and relocated the company I worked at to just a few miles away to East Palo Alto. If you know anything about the San Fransisco Bay Area then you would know that in the 1980's and into the 1990's, East Palo Alto is a slum. I worked at that company for a total of 8 years. After the company moved to the slums, I quit and about 18 months later the mother company back in Cleveland closed that location down and laid everyone off.
I was fortunate enough to find a wonderful job just about a week after I quit that last job. The company made electronic connectors. It was highly profitable. I worked there for 12 years. I earned $60K a year and it was wonderful. Dream jobs like that don't happen often and soon my dream came to an end. The company's owner decided to retire and put the company up for sale. Tyco Electronics bought it and promptly moved everything and laid everyone off. End of dream job.
Out of my last 3 jobs, 2 of them are still in business and one has closed its doors. So I will see if they will succumb to the curse of hiring me.
Get The Dumb Shits I Work With on your Kindle. Click on the link for a free 14 day trial today.
No comments:
Post a Comment