Number 11…and counting

Some guy with lots of money and nothing better to do started buying up large chunks of stock in the company I worked for. Pretty soon he tried to take control of the whole company ($4.4 billion). This (hostile takeover attempt) made senior management really nervous and unhappy. So they found a group of investors (white knights) who weren’t hostile, and they bought up most of the stock and senior management got to keep their jobs. But now the company owed a lot of money ($3.1 billion) to the white knights and had to sell off company assets in order to repay it. The first asset they sold, highly profitable and therefore highly saleable, was the division I worked in ($700 million).

The new owners had an entirely different philosophy and management style, and soon almost no one was happy, including me. Within five years, the number of branch offices in our division had been reduced from 350 to 3 with corresponding reductions in employees. Shredded. And so it came to pass that after 23 years, I was given some money (golden parachute [10-karat]) and shown the door. This really made me mad because employees were given a walnut grandfathers clock in recognition of 25 years of service, and I was just two years short.

But I was prepared. I knew from the rumor mill that I was to be downsized and outcast on January 6th; by the next day, January 7th, I was a full-time student at California State University, finishing my degree in English. We sold the little house by the Big House in Folsom and that September, as I was finishing up my final classes in summer school, the Mrs. went back to Albuquerque to buy another house, our eleventh.

Now it’s kind of tricky buying a house without a job. She found one though through an old high school buddy of our daughter, a nice house with an assumable loan––just pay the seller their equity and take over the payments. It was a typical New Mexico stucco house, on the corner, a former show home near the golf course, now outfitted with decorative, wrought iron grill work on the doors and windows to keep the drug users from breaking in. (There are now an estimated 15,000 gang members hanging about in Albuquerque. But, what the heck, the sun shines 300 days a year and the humidity is low.)

Most Albuquerque back yards are surrounded by 5 foot high, cement block walls within which one finds grass, flowers and trees––all watered by sprinklers of one type or another. Front yards have typical Southwestern landscaping comprised of 1-2″ white stone and an occasional yucca, cactus or pampas grass. Spartan, but necessary due to very low annual rainfall (Albuquerque 9”, Romney 40”) and not-infrequent water restrictions. In addition to the foregoing, previous owners of our new home had the bad sense to populate the yards, front and back, with a dozen pyracantha bushes which had grown to be 8 feet tall. If you are unfamiliar with pyracantha (aka. firethorn), think of it as a beautiful, barbed wire, out-of-control, monster. I say beautiful because they display clusters of flowers and orange berries. I say out-of-control monster because they are covered with 1″ needle-like thorns, grow like weeds and require frequent pruning, which I could only accomplish while balancing on a tall step ladder. Trying to dispose of the cuttings in plastic garbage bags is like trying to stuff your cat into a sock. But, these thorny monsters probably helped keep the banditos, rustlers and gang members from hopping over the wall and stealing our gold.

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