Day 12 - Good News Bad News

          A recruiter called today about a job with an aerospace firm in Tulsa. She, the recruiter, found my résumé on line. She thinks I would be a good fit. She wondered if I would be willing to relocate to Tulsa. I love Tulsa. I have a lot of close friends there. I’ve been telling people since I left Oklahoma that I would move back there in a heartbeat. We talked for a while and she agreed to submit my résumé to her client. This is a very cool development.

          At work there is still no word on my replacement. People were stopping me in the hallways to ask am I leaving or what. Everyone seemed surprised to see me walking around doing the same old stuff after all the rumors that I’d been shot dead. In response I just grin and nod. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. What does anyone say in a situation like this? Probably best just to say nothing, and that’s pretty much what I did.

          There’s still no revised severance agreement to sign either. I’m in limbo. The closing is finished. All the reports are submitted. I spent some time with Helen going over projects she’s been working on. We have a physical inventory coming up at the end of October, which is also the end of our fiscal year. Auditors will be here to verify our counts. We have also just implemented a perpetual inventory system, so the physical inventory will validate the accuracy and efficacy of the new perpetual system.

I already know that it’s not going to be very pretty. The cycle counts are showing large shrinkages in key commodities. This means that our bills of material are wrong, that we are not assigning enough material cost to our products so that our margins are inflated from reality. I’ve been having a hard time convincing Fritz to take the adjustments now rather than waiting until year end. He thinks my assessment of our shortfall is too pessimistic. He thinks I’m stupid. To be fair, he thinks everyone is stupid. He doesn’t think there’s any way we could be using up as much unaccounted material as I say we are. I’ll be happy to be gone by the time they do the inventory counts. I hate physical inventories. They are always worrisome, and they always wear me out.

Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy today. The government decided to let them fail. There’s been a lot of other activity since the beginning of the month, some of it scary, most of it curious. Seems to me that things must be way worse than they are letting on at the moment.

This was the beginning of the end--September 2008--when so many problems in the economy came to a head and the various bubbles and dams burst unleashing a flood of troubles. Follow the following link for a pretty good discussion of all the factors involved:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%932010