Well, after the purchase of First Cellular by Alltel we figured that our jobs would be eliminated. We were right, and the final date is closing in fast. In a little over two weeks every position but sales will be eliminated. It’s been a long road watching everyone go gradually.

Most everyone was gone at the beginning of November, and now the rest of us will be gone June first. We have all come to accept the coming fate and most of us have been looking for something new to move on to for our future.

Most everyone is planning to take a vacation of some sort once D-Day arrives. All but two or three of us are looking work, the older women who will be retiring shortly anyway have no need, so they are just biding their time. We younger people are looking, but not having any luck locally finding employment. The same problem is being faced by those who left in November, lack of open positions.

We are all good at what we do, but the jobs were somewhat industry specific. We had to know a lot about mobile phones and their systems, but how much call is there for that around here? I personally had to know about our MTSO, IP and gateway setup, our billing system, GSM configurations, laptop connectivity, XML, port forwarding, and so much more that doesn’t directly relate to anything that I know of open around here.

If I cannot find anything over the course of the summer, I will probably just go back to school in the fall to get a Sysadmin degree. I plan to specialize in Linux administration, but I’ll have to take Win classes since M$ pays the school to include those classes in the coursework.

EDITED: Fixed a cohesive error so graciously pointed out by my wife in the comments.