Takeover

I came into the office this morning to have my boss tell me in an ominous tone: "you'd better check your mail". My first thought was "oh shit, what have the Egyptians done now?", but then I see the following:

"We are delighted to announce that early this morning CAPE became part 
of the largest non-financial company in Portugal.

Specifically CAPE has been purchased by our most respected competitor, 
WeDo Consulting."

So, they're calling it a merger, but is like the HP/Compaq "merger" - WeDo and Cape are being merged into a company called: "WeDo". So now I'm working for a Portugese company. Is going to take a good while to merge the two, but that is going to be the end result. So, my first buyout!

According to the 2hr meeting we just had on it, our jobs are all safe - in fact the new company has so many unfilled jobs on the books that they'll be hiring a lot more ppl! Will be a big change in the way we do business here in dublin anwyay - definitely in terms of my group. Instead of supporting customers all over the world, we're just going to be handling Northern Europe. Am not a happy camper over that.

When I started this job I was told I'd be spending at least 1/3 of the time on the road, possibly up to 2/3 - was pretty much the reason I took the job in the first place! I've been a bit pissed off with the whole travel thing for a while actually. I've only had one trip to one shithole of a place, and in the last 2 months I've had trips to Reading, Ecuador and Cairo dangled in front of me and then cancelled, which sucks (well, maybe not the Reading one). Now we've been told that the Dublin office will be responsible for Ireland, England and Scandinavia. No more pissing off to Asia or South America for me! I joined this job to go off to foreign places, I didn't join to spend my days rooting through server log files and poking through database tables or answering questions/fixing problems from some customer who didn't read the manual before he started hitting buttons, which is what I'm doing now.

We have a meting later on this afternoon with the boss to see what exactly this is going to mean for our team in particular. Will be pondering my options after that.

At least it may mean trips to Lisbon for "orientation meetings" maybe..... :-)