Of course the economy would make it to my list of highlights of 2008. You’d have to be under a rock not to have noticed. It certainly did affect us here at MT.Net.
We began the year pretty well-off financially. I’d picked up my job at the address verification company and life was good. News of layoffs elsewhere gave me pause but I assumed I was in a good spot working for an international company.
I watched as our retirement savings shed more than 30% of its value. Painful, but we’ve got lots of time to make it back up. We figured it was time to go shopping for stock bargains.
Then the bottom dropped out in Germany (and elsewhere), and I found myself out of a job in mid-November. Having been in this spot before, I stayed positive, quickly hit the job boards, and hit up my friends for job leads. In the meantime, I got in the virtual line for unemployment benefits (and watched as the ESC website crashed and burned).
I got a few chances to talk about my predicament: to the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press – one which didn’t run and one that did. Neither story attracted much attention but it didn’t seem to matter, as I soon picked up a contract gig at a Large Networking Storage Company. My time between paychecks lasted six weeks.
While the money is flowing again for us we are still in hunker-down mode – just like everyone else. I’m pretty confident there’ll be a permanent job waiting for me in six months but financial prudence rules the day.
We’ve always been lousy “consumers.” And that’s just the way we like it. What’s good for our “economy” isn’t good for the country’s.