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| At the beginning of September (the 7th), Lineo laid me off. I have to say that I was actually relatively happy about this. The previous few months had been long days and no time off - high pressure, and lots of new things going on. Not that I didn't like working for Lineo - I did (and do - see below) and still thought that Lineo had the right business model and people to make it in the embedded software business. So... with time now in hand, Shirley and I planned a holiday - a couple of weeks somewhere away from cell phones and computers (at least) - and were looking for somewhere to go at a reasonable price. Bruce Balden, also given a pink slip, started looking at our Belcarra Messaging company and its customers from the point of view of being active instead of just directors, and we lined up a couple of meetings to crank up the activity as this looked like it would be our main source of income again. September 11th, I was still in bed when news of the first airplane hitting the WTC came on the radio. Not knowing the weather or other factors, I made the assumption that others not in New York did at first - this was an accident. When the second plane hit, I knew we were faced with terrorism, no ifs, ands or buts. The events of that day are well documented elsewhere - I'll only note that I spent the entire day sitting in front of the TV and thinking about what this meant, not only to me and my family, but to the life in general, business, and the future. More about those thoughts later. The afternoon of September 12th, I was out getting a full-face motorcycle
helmet so I could more comfortably ride the Yamaha 600 For various reasons, I didn't restart active work with Lineo for 3 weeks. During that time I found myself "futzing" with various things around the house quite a bit - trying to decide whether I really wanted to return to Lineo, or to just cut the ties and go on to other things. While doing some much needed bookkeeping work with my good friend David Ingram we ended up discussing this futzing phenomenon - in light of his loss of his daily program on Shaw cable TV earlier in the summer. He related a story about one of his friends, a prominent federal MP, who he met the day after a devastating defeat at the polls. The gentleman had been a reigning politician for 20+ years - and now was no longer elected - and was standing in front of a display of gate latches at the local hardware store. David related that he watched the man spend 35 minutes looking at about 5 varieties of latch, trying to decide which one to buy. We both commented that we'd likely have simply purchased one of each (total, about $10.00) and taken them home, and that he likely would have too - the day before. Now, with time on his hands and nothing else of importance to do, he was futzing - wasting time doing minor things because he could - not with any real design, but because he had nothing else better to do and no obvious time pressure. The same thing happened both to David and to me. We both found time on our hands due to losing an activity which otherwise would have occupied our minds and time to the limits. Both of us also noted that due to this loss, we had lost much of our "get up and go" and were having trouble getting back into the swing of things. Even the short time between the 7th and the 12th was enough to derail my energy. Gathering it again is still an ongoing exercise, and writing this and other things is one of the ways I'm working at the problem. One of the more frustrating things about the last few months with Lineo has been the lack of time and opportunity to write - I guess it is something I'll have to work at again. |
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I had been fixing up in the previous weeks. Just as I was paying for the new
helmet, the Lineo COO phoned me
and rescinded the layoff, saying that while he was out of the country,
"some hasty decisions were made". I was now in the position of having
completely forgotten about Lineo in terms of day to day activity, and being
engaged in actively working at doing something else.