Capes-n-Babes

A longer post is coming but for now, here is the second strip, featuring my friend, Lauren Hilton.

Okay, here’s the longer post…
So as I said in my previous post, today’s strip features Lauren Hilton. Lauren and I have worked together for many years on a government contract. We were a part of a small but really awesome team that did work for the USMC. Last year, that contract was about to go in limbo so we all went our separate ways. I went to the US State Department and started working on the US Embassy’s website redesign project – as many of you know. When that contract was up, that same division of the USMC reached out to me to see if I would be interested in coming back and working with them with a new company. First question I asked was who all would be on this new team. It turned out it was pretty much “the old gang” so I said “yes”.

That means Lauren and I have been working together for close to five years now. That is, until today, of course. Just like last year, a bunch of us had a good-bye lunch this past Wednesday and I said good-bye to all the people that were able to show up and that i really appreciated working with for a number of years.

This has been a crazy month, for sure. As many of you know that follow me on Facebook, I was told I was going to be laid off on the 15th of this month. I wasn’t SUPPOSED to be told until the following Monday, the 19th but one of those people that I enjoyed working with so much went out of his way to give me the advanced heads up. Needless to say it was a real shocker as I had been told a wide range of very promising “long term stability” type things in my initial interview when I came back to this particular USMC contract. Plus, many of the USMC people involved in the contract WANTED me back. Desperately. They hadn’t had any UI/UX designer on staff for over a year and the work looked like it. The sad truth is, sometimes, very few people really appreciate UI/UX design work until they see the difference a web site can make once a designer gets his or her hands on the site and starts making all kinds of design and usability suggestions and changes.

But no matter how many “promises” are made to any of us, they are just that – unless we get those things in some kind of written guarantee. So, for me, all of those “exciting opportunities” were just empty promises. Thankfully though, now that I have a new job I will be starting on Monday, I can look back at this experience and call it a “sad one”. Had I not been able to land on my feet in such a wildly, still-wrapping-my-head-around-it scenario, believe me, I would be calling this experience anything BUT “sad”.

The REAL sadness though is having to once again say “good-bye” to group of friends that I REALLY enjoyed working with. That’s why I said I would come back. I came back to get a chance to make improvements in the USMC work I had previously done, work with the USMC people who really wanted me back but most importantly, to work once again with a tight knit group that worked their butts off but also had a lot of fun in the process as well. They really weren’t “co-workers” in the truest sense of the word. No, they were “friends” who just happened to all be working on the same project as I was.

And again, one of those friends is Lauren.

So, as a parting little gift, I have put Lauren in the strip – something I had never done during the five or six years we have worked together. But now she can for ever say she was once a “sexy zombie” and have proof to show everyone she knows!