This put Phil into the ranks of the now 17% unemployed in high tech in the over-50 age bracket. That's right, folks - while our high-tech CEOs claim "shortage of qualified applicants" so they can import young 24/7 low-wage workers from India by the 100,000, there's double-digit unemployment among their most qualified employees! And remember, high tech is our second best industry in the 1990s. (Our first is prison construction.)
It was plain old management cluelessness - nose so close to the figures that they didn't realize they were downsizing a Congressional Candidate in a silhouette race with global name recognition on the most visible day of the campaign - and Phil's whole platform was against downsizing! Three guys were working intensely three hours a night, one company profile per thirty seconds and they'd just changed the product definition two weeks before. Phil figured they'd cut him and the other two guys some slack until the new product definition settled down, but no, management wanted two guys to work 4-1/2 hours a night to save on benefits. This move was the exact opposite of Phil's timesizing concept which spreads work across more people instead of loading it on fewer people. The new workload turned out so intense after Phil left that the faster of the two surviving employees quit within the following month. Brilliant.
Phil taped the debate from 5:30 to 6:10 pm at WGBH on Western Ave. in Allston, walked out, and two hours later was getting laid off in Burlington. On the way, he stopped at WMFO to appear briefly on Tony Schinella's (yes, Phil's current tagteam mate in the race for the 8th) talk show at Tufts, roared up Route 3 to Burlington and got pulled over for speeding. When the officer heard the circumstances, he let Phil go with a warning.
Phil's colleagues were gathering round and congratulating him for a good showing on the debate one minute and the next minute, Phil's boss was pulling him over into a conference room for a talk. He hemmed and hawed a bit and when Phil figured out he was going for the big one, Phil burst out laughing. Truly the timing was perfecto. His boss couldn't figure out why Phil was laughing, so Phil "drew him a diagram." "Oh yes," says Richard, "I can see that this might have been terrible timing...." Phil offered to work for less pay, but blah blah blah. Phil phoned the company president in the morning with an offer to settle it quietly for a two-year contract, but blah blah blah - they continued clueless with an offer of a continued job for only a month or two - no guarantees - thinking that would be doing Phil a big favor by not embarrassing him right before the election.
But the embarrassment was more in the other direction. Why waste such a potential political GIFT with no guarantees? It was the very opposite of timesizing and as Lao Tzu said (with apologies for adaptation), "He who would lead the economy must experience the worst the economy has to offer."
So Phil faxed press releases to every major newspaper in the country and among others, made the midweek Globe and the Sunday Globe RIGHT before the election, and got the sympathy vote as well as the idea vote, the Republican vote, the small-party vote, the protest vote, and the cashfree-campaign vote, all in all 27,271 votes for spending $600 while Kennedy got 145,000 odd votes for spending nearly two million dollars!
It had been, for Phil, the ideal job of the future - a well-paying 20-hr/wk job with half benefits in the evenings when he'd be watching TV anyway. It was like getting paid to do research on his book. Individual Inc. was a high tech news sorting firm, got in 17,000 stories a day off some 200 newswires, did two computer sorts and got in 40 humans to clean up the results - cut duplicates, dump misfires (UPS=Uninterruptable Power Supply instead of UPS=United Parcel Service, etc.) and prioritize. Phil worked on Business and Finance for most of the nearly two-year period. Individual Inc. existed on venture capital and probably never made a profit in its entire 10-15 year history.