August 03, 2007

Out of Work

Thursday August 2nd we were called into a meeting, I was about two hours into my shift. Earlier we had received an e-mail that 'big-wigs' would be out and about today. At the meeting they announced they were closing the call center and handed us our final checks.

This took everyone by suprise. Not even the upper management seemed to know what was going on. Now in retrospect you can pierce the veil and see what happened.

Dell went after the home market with a vengence. The $399.00 pc. They expanded the sales force and went after other electronic markets. MP3 players, Plasma Televisions, Home Entertainment technologies. This was all under the tenure of Kevin Rollins.

The stocks tumbled, the company did some cost saving measures and outsourced a bulk of the customer care and technical support. Quality all around slipped. The Bloggers really went into overdrive and the bad press etc. Kevin 'left' the company. If you look at his parting gifts compared to other CEO's you can read between the lines.

IMHO it was a line on a spreadsheet that delivered our fate. Anyone looking for a smart tech savvy guy with excellent personal skills. Dependable and loyal.

I'm looking,.

4 comments:

shoo said...

Major bummer. I imagine tech jobs are relatively scarce there.

And that job produced such great blog fodder too...

Best of luck. I am sure you will land on your feet somewhere.

shoo said...

BTW...did they give you a decent severance package?

shoo said...

You would think that being out of work, you would have lots of time to update your blog :P

Rocky said...

I did a little checking and under Texas Law (best I can determine), a company with more than 45 employees has to either A) give 60 days notice of a massive lay-off/plant closing or B) pay 60 days wages.

So Dell did the bare minimum they could get away with legally.

I'm sorry for the closing and so VERY glad I left when I did. Even before this happened I had told Sue that I thought we had bought our LAST Dell computer, now that Apple can run windows apps (ok, ok, Games lol).

Now I'm certain of it (unless the unit comes from a more morally acceptable source (like from that guy "Vinnie" that always has stuff that "fell off the back of a truck")