Tonto my Friend, I'm sorry to say that I have to kill you...

I am offering you one last chance to back out with your dignity, before my shiny new silver bullet cuts you down. You should leave now while you are still sat upon your horse. I'm going it alone now, and nothing you can say will stop me. I know that you have been wise in the past, and I ignored you then to my own detriment. There is nothing I can do about that now except to remove you as a daily reminder of my own mis-steps. I have told you all along that your efforts are no longer appreciated or even acknowledged. Yet you stay. Why? So that I can pester you further, cut you off at the knees. Tonto my friend, can you not see that I am standing in quick sand with a noose extended around my neck. Sinking...sinking further...darkness taking hold.

Buy the Square Foot...

Leases. There are leases for everything; from furniture to cars to office space. The intention of a lease is to be less expensive than ownership, or for the more saavy, tax evasion purposes. For the less fortunate, leasing becomes a way of life and it can cloak what would otherwise be an obvious fact: you're paying too much. If you lease a thousand dollar couch for $300 per month for instance, in the words of Napolean Dynamite, "Your an IDIOT". Now, take your leased furniture, add 500 square feet per employee for office space in the hottest market on the planet, and make sure that your operating expenses are deep in the red. If you just did all that, "Your an IDIOT".

What Goes Down Must Come Back Up...

That is, unless you are in a death spiral. In a financial sense, a death spiral insues when a cash starved company is bent over an invester's knee and coerced in to accepting terms and conditions that will ultimately lead to the company's own demise. The shrapnel expeled during a death spiral will most likely take out all but the most optimistic, misguided, or vested individuals during it's downward plunge-- thus exacerbating and already bad situation in to a feverish pitch of delusion and mass expulsion of misinformation from top tier individuals fearing for their own wellbeing and other self driven motivations.

You know that things are bad when...

The technical advisory board is twice the size of the company itself and collectively have 10x the options of all but the executives.

Dust cloud.

Sometime yesterday afternoon the engineering pit was consumed in a fog-like existance that looked like the remanants of a pyro-technics display gone horribly wrong. The dust was such a fine consistancy that it was difficult to breath causing the Irishman to head for the hills and other engineers to gasp for breath wondering if this was truly the end.

Apparently concrete dust was kicked up from the ongoing construction next door and sucked straight through the rickety ventilation system and in to our open area where it was immediately dispersed through our lab equipment. But, a little dust never affected any computer equipment, so the lab managed to stay alive through the ordeal. With IT out on personal leave one disaster was fortunately averted.

I rushed to the end of the street to purchase emergency dust masks only to be faced by the very real possibility that I would never be reimbured for the $5 cost per unit. So, I lingered in Walgreens just long enough to choke down a drink to get the concrete aftertaste out of my mouth and went back in...