What Colors the Steel Sky Blue

I would start at the beginning if I remembered where the beginning was; so instead I would like to begin with a promise to myself here in this first long sentence that will be followed by many more: However naked, unappealing, unacceptable, and hurtful the actual set of events are, I will stick to facts, actual events, real people, and my true feelings.

I moved to New York City in May 3 2001, but I have to go back a few years to explain why I attempted such an act of insanity.

I had previously lived in Austin, Texas and loved it for what it's worth. I used to work for Top Mark Productions(TMP), a small multimedia company that was in turn acquired by Hovering Creations(HC), a bigger local company in the same line of business. Things never went quite as expected between TMP and HC.

It was surprising for the TMP employees to find that the parent company, despite its glamour and name in the news, was a Texas sized complete mess on the inside. HC was starting to fall apart slowly mostly due to its screwed up culture and lack of understanding of how to maintain a steady pipeline. This weakened state primed HC for acquisition and it was the year 2000, the year of the new Economy, the year of endless needless acquisitions. An environment that was so incestuous in terms of corporations that it made the last days of Rome look conservative and wholesome.

Anyhow, HC was soon acquired by Scalding Corp(SC), a so called premier internet consultancy firm with more than 3000 employees, soaring stock, offices worldwide, and a long list of huge clients.

Normally you would expect all HC employees to be celebrating for 40 days and nights straight about this acquisition considering the salary adjustments, promotions, all expenses paid relocations to other cities. But there was no celebration, there was a huge horrible, ugly silence instead as we all sat at the Waterloo Brewery's theater that could accommodate the HC folk, the TMP folk and all the booze and food that was required to bring HC people to do anything at all (which usually amounts to truck loads of low grade beer and chicken wings). So we sat there as the co-CEO (who needs two people to make bad decisions when just one seems to be doing enough for many corporations --this should have been an early warning.) went on about how the acquisition felt like a Christmas in August, and how this synergy, and that alignment with industry, and global positioning, distributed delivery etc. would make us all rich if we promised to put in the ungodly overtime hours we had become used to during the HC years. I was already getting a migraine from the incessant stream of acronyms...

I had never seen grown men cry like the HC higher ups about the acquisition. If someone that did not know the context saw them they would think that these guys were just fired from their jobs of twenty years. The bemoaning of the acquisition went on for months and never quite died down...for a good reason too.

SC was slowly killing HC with every little policy change, every little tweak, every little alignment and positioning the HC spirit was dying. I think many people that cried, moaned, complained, and barked early on had in some ways foreseen the end of their glory days. Six months after the acquisition, I now understood them. I did, and I somewhat liked the HC people now, partially because they had become the subject of exactly what they did to us, TMP folk.