My Last Day

As many of you know I worked at 38 Studios.  The dearth of posts to this site can be pretty much directly attributed to the collapse of that company and my having to deal with all fallout.  I won’t go into the details, suffice it to say that I wish job hunting was the only thing I was dealing with right now.  For those who have no clue what I’m talking about, here’s about the most even keeled article I can find.

OK, actually, I will go into one very specific personal detail which is the point of this post: my last day.  On Wednesday, May 23rd, things were looking pretty bad.  We weren’t laid off yet, but we knew that was the direction things were headed.  We were told the next day, Thursday the 24th, would not be a work day and there was no reason to come into the office.  Many did anyway.

Me, I did not.  Actually, I planned on coming in late in the evening to pick up boxes of things I had packed in preparation for the worst.  But I spent the day at home working on a miniature painting project.

You see, a while ago I had bought some centaur miniatures with the idea of eventually building a little diorama for Curt.  He’s a big centaur fan, and their use in our game was something of a running joke.  I really do believe in what that article I linked above has to say about Curt, I don’t blame him personally for any of the crap that went down.  He’s passionate, optimistic, and generally just a really nice guy.  And he looked out for us gamers in the office, more than any boss I’d ever had.

He bought us a huge pile of dwarven forge stuff for our games.  He also bought two beautiful tables from Geek Chic for the game room in the office, one of them a Sultan, both emblazoned with 38 logos.  They were fantatsic.  And no, he did not spend company money on this stuff, all this was right out of his own pocket.

So, on my last day, knowing I wasn’t going to have another chance, I built that diorama.  It wasn’t quite as extravagant as I had originally planned.  If anything, I’d say I’m a little disappointed in how flat it looks.  But what the heck, I only had a day to complete it.  Around 4:00 PM I got the email that said I was laid off.  By 7:00 PM I was in Curt’s office handing over the gift I made him.

I did learn one important lesson about hand-made presents from the books I made for Tim Kask and Frank Mentzer: take photos.  I love giving hand-made stuff as gifts, but it’s disappointing to not have some nice photos to look back at and remember the projects you worked on.  So that’s what I did this time, I took lots of pictures before I brought it down to RI.

I’m posting them here, mostly so I can have a URL to send to former coworkers to check it out.  There are some references in it that probably only ex-38 folks would get.  To those outside, it probably won’t make much sense.  Feel free to speculate if you like, I will not comment on it.

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