Cutting Costs...

Darren isn’t the only one cutting costs. The company I work for laid off a fair number of people world wide not too long ago. I had heard rumors of this a couple of weeks ago and it was confirmed later in that same  week.

While I knew I wasn’t going to be laid off, just knowing that it was happening took a bit of a toll on my nerves.

Now I’m not new to lay offs, I’ve been through several over the 11 years working here and you’d think it would get easier, but it doesn’t. The longer you’re at the same place, the more you get to know the people. The more you get to know the people, the more you tend to care about them. You get to know them, see they have families, see they have issues that are a lot like your own. You realize you share interests and become friends.

No one I’m close to here was let go. I’m fortunate about that but I was never certain of that. That compounded on top of other issues. I can’t say the same for some of the friends of my friends here. Some of them saw people they’ve worked with for over 10 years let go.

It’s not easy. On anyone involved. And it won’t be easy going forward as the workloads are redistributed to those that are still here.

Where is all this going?

Well, when things get stressful, people can either drown in it, burn out, bottle it up or do something that relieves stress. For me, that’s getting into RPG systems, which is why I’ve been poking around in D&D 4e lately. So you can see where my sudden interest in 4e has come from.

Now, Darren’s cutting costs made me think about my subscriptions. I am, currently, subscribed to World of Warcraft and Wizard 101. I almost decided to cancel Wizard 101 because my son hasn’t shown much interest in it lately, so, of course, he suddenly showed some interest in it yesterday. I’ll be keeping those two subscriptions for quite awhile.

I’m not really subscribed to a whole lot at the moment. My gaming costs are low since I don’t buy nearly as many games as I used to and I’m not chasing technology (I’ve spent about 20k over the last 10 years on PCs – that’s 2k/year). All that to say, I’m thinking I might pick up a year long subscription to D&D Insider soon, even though all the tools aren’t available yet. The cost of it is about what it would cost me to buy a game off the shelf so I think I’m going to go for it and see how it all works.

Or maybe I’ll ask the wife for it for Christmas…

UPDATE: The wife bought me a year long subscription. I’ll take a peek at it when I get home. She might not be a gamer, but she is pretty cool about this sort of stuff (substitute ‘cool’ with ‘patient’).

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