Springtime for Hitler! (or, the comedy of errors that is Zach's soon-to-be-non-existent employment situation)

Last Saturday, while D and I were still at my mom's in Texas, I got a call from Zach.  He was telling me about how the night before he'd gone out drinking with one of his coworkers and a few other friends, singing karaoke at a bar and then going back to one of their houses and jumping in the hot tub, etc... pretty classic drunken night, reminiscing of bachelorhood.  Then he says, "By the way I have something I have to tell you, and I've been debating about telling you now and potentially ruining your weekend or waiting till you get back home..."

Ooookaaaaay...  At this point my mind's racing, I'm imagining that he crashed the car, or maybe even managed to drunkenly make out with his married coworker or something.  I make him wait while I go up to a secluded bedroom upstairs and close the door, and braced myself for whatever he had to say...

Turns out his boss had pulled him aside Friday and told him that there was going to be a massive reorganization at work.  A bunch of lay-offs, whole divisions being shut down.  His current position will no longer be there once the new year starts, but they're wanting to offer him other positions within the company... though they'd all would be in areas that involve lots of travel, which we've already decided is not ok for us.  Oh, and the announcement about all this wouldn't be made till Wednesday (yesterday) so we couldn't tell anyone.

I must say, I was actually quite relieved.  Ok, so it's not great news-- but we've kinda been expecting this for a while now.  Maybe not this exactly, but the past year or two for Zach working there, it's been like watching a train wreck happen in slow motion, for a good month now Zach has been reaching out to contacts and trying to find a new job, hoping to leave his current place by the end of the year anyway.  Things have been going downhill for a while-- he almost left a few years ago, right before they offered us the Geneva deal (which Zach figured at the time was a really bad decision for the company, but hey it's hard to turn down a chance to live in Europe on someone else's dime).  At every crossroads along the way, the top decision makers have gone in the exact opposite direction that Zach thinks they should've gone (and that the company's original goals were in).  And I know Zach may not be a genius or expert in all this, but things have slowly unraveled, and every formerly-profitable company they have bought and taken over has been run to the ground (including the place in Geneva, which was dismantled mere months after we moved back), and the spin-offs or rival companies that have gone in those other directions, are doing ok or even succeeding.  By the way, some of our expat bills and even our taxes from last year are still not resolved because of how incompetent certain parts of this company are.

Each day this week he's come home more bewildered and flabbergasted than the day before.  All the good people are leaving or planning to leave.  The people left who are supposed to be in charge of the new business plan have been proven to be incompetent and ineffective.  It's all just surreal.  Through unrelated events I recently became painfully aware that there's a certain class of people who, no matter what, remain completely oblivious to their own mistakes and errors and instead continue to believe unfailingly in their own rightfulness.  It appears this place is run by a whole bunch of them, blind to all the bad decisions they've made that have brought the company down.  That, or they're purposefully going for a The Producers-esque approach and just trying to make it all fail.

Right now it's all mostly just amusing.  I suppose I should be more worried, but being the loving, faithful wife that I am, I have full faith that Zach is a talented, desired employee who will find another job easily (hopefully before the end of the year, but we also have a cushion of several months' worth of savings in case it takes longer).  He's got a couple places he's been talking to (has an interview with one of them later today) each of which could be a good fit, and hopefully will give some sort of offer in the next couple weeks.  If those fall through, that's when it'll get a bit more scary-- I still think Zach will be able to find a job, the question then will be if he can find one here in the Bay Area or if we might have to move.