Summer Vacation
I did summer school a few times when I was in college. I liked summer school. The town was mostly empty, so there was never a crowd anywhere. You could always get a table. The bars all pretty much had a three-month-long happy hour. There was a peaceful, easy-going atmosphere on campus. There was solidarity. Nobody really wanted to be there, not the students, not the poor schlub faculty who drew the short straws.But despite that, there was actual work to do. Three hours taken over the summer counted the same as three hours during the fall. So you had to fight through and take things seriously, somehow.
It occurred to me that working at a company that’s going out of business is exactly like summer school. Especially in our case. The ownership wants us to finish the last version, for when they sell the what of the company they can, in our case the intellectual property. Our new version is going to be dynamite, and it’ll make a much better presentation than the previous old crumbly version.
Anyway, as long as the paychecks keep clearing, we keep working on the software. But ultimately, in the back of our heads, it’s not going to be in massive circulation. So even though we have a very hard deadline, there’s a real sense of urgency that’s missing.
