Sometimes when life gives you lemons...

The past couple of days have been interesting for me.

On Monday afternoon I got a meeting request from scheduling coordinator at my employer to meet with my supervisor as soon as I got back to the office. I was in the process of troubleshooting a new VPN system at a customer at the time and did not think much of it. As the afternoon progressed it became apparent that the troubleshooting was going to take longer than I had originally thought due to some legacy configurations on the clients network (but that will be another story for another time). So I asked to schedule an appointment on Tuesday to meet with my supervisor.

On Tuesday I continued to work on the clients network and was able to navigate through the legacy configurations to interconnect the new remote sites to the rest of the network and then on a series of questions that another client had about setting up DNS records and resizing the C: drives on some of their core servers.

Over the past month or so I had noticed that many of my fellow security engineers had been sitting around the office with me and when I commented on this to my supervisor he was concerned but there should be quite a bit of work upcoming (in the pipe was the term he used). I was hopeful that this would be the case and that most of would be out working on a regular basis again.

Unfortunately the work has not materialized as they had planned/predicted and cost cutting methods need to be taken. I was one of the cost cutting methods.

It worked out very similarly to what happened to Andy last year (read about it here).

I walked into the meeting with some suspicion of what was going on as my inquiries as to what was the meeting was about were met with silence. After a brief chat about the clients I had worked on earlier in the day, my supervisor told me that he had to make a difficult decision and due to my salary as it compared to a couple of the other engineers who also had not been billable I was going to be laid off.

This is not necessarily a bad time for this to have happened. I am going to be facilitating a Peer2Peer session at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. So if you are going to be in attendance and would like to set up a meeting with me, please e-mail me using my contact information under my details.

I was also wise enough to have discussed the possibility with my wife that morning, so we were prepared for this possibly happening.

I am thankful for her support and the support I have received from the other Trusted Catalysts and other members of the Security Catalyst Community.

I'll post my resume on line within the next couple of days. Thoughts, prayers and suggestions would be appreciated, comment below.