Things have been slow at work; slow now for weeks. Occasionally my manager will come over with an urgent project, but those are less than 2 days in duration, and far between.

I am not comfortable with being so un-busy. I am used to keeping active - trying to accomplish ten things at once and somehow juggle all that with mandatory meetings, reports, email to answer, code to monitor. I am not used to having twice as long as I need to complete a project instead of only half.

It's not that I want to be as overloaded as I was in my previous job. It's just that I want to feel useful. Call me crazy, but I just want to feel like I'm worth the money they're paying me.

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A former coworker told me that the Big Fish just went through a round of layoffs. Sounds like it was primarily in the consulting division, which really wasn't too unexpected. They hired on a whole bunch of new people and trained them in the ways of the Little Fish's software during the past two years. However, once they announced that they were not only going to scrap the Little Fish's version and replace it with a Big Fish version, but that they were also not going to support any old-version installations much longer, naturally any customer with half a brain decided to wait til the new version came out before actually wasting money on the software and consulting in the first place. And this, of course, meant that all these people they'd hired were now sitting on the bench, bored out of their minds.

Rumor has it that this is the only round of layoffs they're planning, and I'm hoping that's really true. Despite my feelings on the policies of the Big Fish itself, I've still got friends who work there, and I'd rather not see them unemployed any time soon.

I can at least say that I did my part to help keep the Big Fish in business. Big Fish stockholders should be filled with joy because today I finally exercised all my stock options (they gave me 90 days after I left the company). This means that the stock is now free to climb as high as it wants, since I can no longer benefit from the increase.

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By the way, I finally updated my Who Am I page to reflect the more recent changes. That ought to help out those of you who are visiting via the Holidailies ring, got completely lost with my Big Fish, Little Fish references, and assumed I was referring to some obscure Dr. Seuss text.