Last Christmas, there I was, content in the knowledge that at 50 years of age, I had only ten years left on my Mortgage, my children were happy in their relationships and I was in a job which was coming up to the end of its eleventh year. Never before in my working life had I ever given an employer more than nine years, but there I was, just about to complete an eleventh year.
There was I last December, settled, happy enough, working with some good people, planning for my retirement. Life was good.
However just three months before, the team I had been working for, Northern Rock were shaken to the core to learn that other Banks were no longer prepared to deal with them because of their involvement in the Sub-Prime mortgage markets.
Sub Prime lending is where a bank decides to lend money to people who can't get a mortgage from any responsible lender, because they are considered to be a bad risk. Either they can't afford the repayments, or they have a history of defaulting on payments. But the Bank lends them money anyway, figuring that they will simply evict the bastards if they default.
So there I was, one of a team of sixteen or so, which Northern Rock could no longer afford to pay for, so we were "on the bench" or unallocated for the time being. Oh well, no great shakes, things would surely pick up again after Christmas, as our business had so many times before.
Well Christmas was a blast anyway, I had a great time with my family, ate too much, drank too much as usual, but had a wonderful time - our Christmas's are always such fun - we belly laugh. We sing karaoke songs, consume extraordinary amounts of wine and generally let our hair down.Back to work in January was as usual, back to the hum-drum days in the office, I remember speaking to our MD and asking whether things were picking up yet, and he confirmed that they were. However, at the end of the Month, we were all summoned to a company briefing. We knew that there was something afoot when staff who normally worked on-site were told that they must attend the meeting the following day.
There we were on Thursday 31st of January 2008, in an office packed with an expectant crowd of employees as the Vice Chairman handed the task over to the Group Finance Director to break the news to everyone. We were going into Voluntary Liquidation and the insolvency people were on hand to dole out our paperwork and let us know the way forward.
It was one of the worst days of my life. Grown men were in tears that day as the news was brokento us. I couldn't stand around and exchange pleasantries, so I high tailed it out of there as quickly as I could. I had though, had a good run - I had reached the age of fifty without ever having been made redundant before.
I got home, as I recall, it rained all day that day... I rang my wife to tell her of the bad news and then I received a phone call from my Brother David. He had been in the same room as me, amongst the throng of people who were given the bullet that day, but he did stay behind to chat & say his goodbyes. David had a conversation with one of our sales guys, Dave Owen who was an account manager for Alliance & Leicester.
Apparently, only the day before, my CV had been presented to A&L with a view to having me placed there on the customer site in the new Release Management function. He gave me a contact name for the guy in charge of Release Management and said I should ring him.
I did.
I was invited in for an informal chat the following week, which seemed to go quite well, but my interviewer, Nik Hegarty had problems in getting the paperwork signed off for me, so it wasn't until the beginning of March that I started as a contractor for Alliance & Leicester through Modis International.
I was in my element. Alliance & Leicester as a Bank had a phenomenal work ethic.
There was a real sense of teamwork, with the development and testing teams working flat out from 7:30 a.m. until (some of them) around 11:00p.m.
The common goal was to deliver release 2A of the CORE program on time.
Release Management was as different a role as I could possibly imagine to undertake. Where my background had been in development and system support, I was now verifying the quality of releases against known defects and ensuring that we had a handle on which code versions were being delivered into which environments. It was a demanding and busy role, but I loved it.
Then, one fine Summers day, we had a visitation from David Bennett, the CEO at A&L who described to us all the conversation he had had over the weekend. It seemed that there was a bid from Spanish banking giants Santander to acquire yet another British bank - they had very recently bought Abbey National and wanted A&L!
Whilst the wheels of takeover began to rotate, the CORE program forged ahead, with a November go-live date looming ahead, we all put noses to the grindstone and continued as though nothing had happened.
Something had happened, though. We were being bought out by one of the largest Banking Corporations in the World. And they were not about to concede that the A&L internet banking site was better than their own, so as soon as the acquisition was complete, it was goodbye CORE.
Yes, another sad day. Two in one year. When the announcement was made that the CORE program was being halted, all the Accenture staff who had worked so dilligently on delivering ALNOVA, people from places as far reaching as Ireland, Spain and the Phillipines, along with all the contract staff who added their expertise to other areas of the CORE program, myself included, were unceremoniously requested to vacate the premesis.
So here we are. Christmas fast approaching and I am once more reduced to trawling the internet and local papers in the vain hope that I shall get a job at the age of fifty one.
Life's like that though, isn't it?
