Poof -- It's gone
The sudden death of a company

Tony is working on his Resume and searching the want ads for anyone who needs a Database Administrator. Andy and a technician are shutting down servers and disconnecting the batteries. The HR department is working on a mail merged letter to be sent to all of the employees along with their final paycheck. The white noise of the laser printer behind me fades as someone shuts it off. Now there is only silence. Outside of our IT department window there would normally have been a constant ruckus. Now there are only empty desks. Sticky notes with various once-important instructions are now meaningless trash. Everywhere there is evidence of a hundred overlapping routines interrupted in mid sentence, never to be completed.

A door bangs in the distance and voices can be heard discussing the graceful shutdown of operations which will be their last official duties at Key Financial Systems. The air is beginning to get stale. Someone has turned off the air conditioning. I've recorded a single message which can be heard on all 59 of our toll-free numbers, which were very recently used for customer service, collections, executive management, automated bank tellers, pay-by-phone, and information. Now they all say simply, This company has been shut down by the Office of the Comptroller of Currency. For further information, contact the FDIC. Bye.It wasn't our fault. We did nothing wrong. A distant relationship with a marginally involved banking institution was a critical component in the legality of our operation. That unit, hundreds of miles away, suddenly dissolved due to problems it was having in a completely different arena.

Unfortunately, we went with it.

There was a bug or two in the phone system, but they were just annoying things, not real problems. We were working on getting them fixed. The collections department had developed a strange error that would crash their applications occasionally. This needed to be fixed. We were going to get to it. The new web site was almost done. The frame of a new domain controller lies on the floor next to Andy's desk. A stack of new Dell PC's recently delivered awaits distribution to the customer service department. A new edition of the company telephone directory sits next to my keyboard.Scrawled in yellow highlighter on the back is a reminder to myself to add Instant Messaging to the Sales Department's application.

An employee sheepishly pokes her way into the lobby, wondering what happened. A girl from HR passes by and stops to explain to her. There's not much she can say. Go get another job somewhere. This one doesn't exist any more.

200 employees. 130,000 customers.

Poof.

Pretty wild.