The economy seems to have little to do with April Fool’s day unless you are a pundit which I generally don’t consider myself but in January of 2009 I found myself in the office of Dow Chemical’s Plaquemine HR director getting the same new as the other colleagues in my department. We were getting the news that our department was being shut down and our services were no longer needed, we were being laid off. All the members of my group were 30+ year employees and one had planned to retire anyway so it wasn’t like we were going to be homeless and hungry but it was still quite a blow. We had about 2 ½ months to wrap everything up, ship off the good stuff and say our goodbyes. Our last official day of work was March 31, making April Fool’s day my first official day of retirement. At 48 I was too young to retire for real but I did decide I would do a few things for myself. A little adventure always makes me feel better. I spend a few days with a colleague who came over from The Netherlands for my retirement party and then I took a bike tour of Louisiana by starting at one end of LA1 on the Texas / Arkansas border and cycling to Grand Isle. When I got home I started looking for a job. The economy was in the tank so jobs were few and far between but I managed to find a part-time work in my field, working for an engineering company with some of the work back at Dow. Towards the end of 2009 my old manager sent word that they were going to post my old job in Freeport TX (where I was scheduled to move the first quarter of 2010) and would like me to consider applying for the job. I was hired and reported to work; you guessed it April 1 of 2010.
Since going back to Dow, I have seen spending pick up and think that unless the economy hits another speed bump that we should be coming out of this mess we have been in. We are seeing contractors jumping from one company to another for a little bump in their hourly wage and the groups I work with having money to spend on new projects. I expect we will see the economy on the gulf coast start getting stronger as the weather gets better.
