Wow what a year!! Left me feeling old, dirty and slow, kind of like this fellow. Started on January 1st, 2009, with a 25% reduction in pay in from my employer. Well I actually had a choice. I could go out on a layoff from my salary job, or I could take the reduction and come back to my same job as an hourly worker. I was told at the time that it was only temporary until things picked up, and I could work a little overtime all along to make up the difference. Apparently they just had to cut down the number of salaried employees. At the time I was just…

Battle is one those slang baseball words. When you are down two strikes and facing a pitcher that rarely throws balls, you are battling. I am going to ad this slang to my position in this economy. I have been battling! Strike One! As of January 1st of 2009, I was thrown a fast ball that I did not even see coming. In an instant, I was basically laid off from my job as a Mechanical Designer/Supervisor, then rehired as a technician, and told to just go back to work doing the same job I had already been doing. And especially, don’t tell anyone else about this as they don’t…

Got yours yet? The more I think about the bailouts, the angrier I get. Wake up world. They are not going to work. The companies are going keep on doing what they have been doing all along. Oh, they will try to make changes, and it might look like its working… for a while. But they will settle right back in to their comfortable old ruts. Let them fail. They will either emerge from restructuring a stronger, leaner version of the original, our they will totally collapse and disappear. If the latter, so be it; it was going to eventually happen anyway, no matter how much cash you throw at…