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My 100 Days at AMD I, like so many other thousands of others, got laid off from Apple Computer in the summer of 1993. Patty—you can read about her here—and I were so devastated that we immediately took a 2-week vacation in Hawaii and another week in England and Scotland. Before you scream, "How can you have been so frivolous? Neither of you had jobs!!!" let me tell you that Apple's policy was to keep you on the payroll for 60 days (with full benefits) and them to give you weeks and weeks of severance (depending on your job level and time at Apple.)
Patty received about 24 weeks of combined severance and I received about 26 weeks. Not quite a "golden parachute," but a fairly comfy cushion on which to land. When we came back, a friend called to suggest that AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) had an opening for someone with my skills and background. To keep a long story from getting longer, I interviewed and took the job a couple weeks later (early October). Here's what led to my departure: 1) Several days after starting, a Director came up to me and introduced himself. As he did, he reached out and tightened the knot on my tie, saying, "Here at AMD we always keep our ties straight and our suit jackets on when we are out of our cubes and offices." He then smiled at me and turned away. 2) My manager called me into his office about 8 days after starting to tell me that the president and CEO of the company had decided to cancel all new programs money for the following year. That meant that the training programs I had been hired to create, and the small training group I was going to try to asemble, were to be put on hold for a full year leaving me with the tasks of creating 1-page "cheat sheets" for the order entry systems, and to go from office to office and help install cabling to get all sales offices in the US connected to an Ethernet backbone. For what they were paying me they could have hired three college students to do all that. 3) About 2 weeks after starting, my wife came to visit me only to be told by the receptionist that she could not come up to see my cube. A V.P. or higher had to authorize any "outsiders" coming into the building farther that the lobby. This wasn't a lab or R-and-D building, it was Sales and Marketing. 4) For Halloween, I painted my face in six horizontal colored stripes, wore a teeshirt and shorts with flip-flops, and my old Apple badge with an Apple sticker over my face (the stripes on my face were in the Apple logo colors). Everyone kept asking me what I was suppose to be, to which I told them that I was an "Apple employee." Nobody saw any humor in it except for three Japanese girls working in the Japan Sales office. Although they spoke no English, each one made it clear that they wanted to have their picture taken with "Apple Man." One of secretaries even went so far as to sadly shake her head and to tell me that I wasn't really an Apple employee any more, and that this was AMD. 5) The company would not pay for a big Christmas party that year because it was saving for a 20th anniversary party the following year. But employees were required to fork out $25.00 apiece for refreshments and decorations for their departmental parties. The highlight of this "it's mandatory because it is being held during work hours" party was the Christmas Song Contest. Groups of 6-8 non-management employees had to get up to sing a Christmas song. We had known about this a week or so in advance, so my group was prepared. I have always thought that the tunes for "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" and "Gilligan's Island" were awfully close. So, we performed the following: After the first verse...
God rest ye merry, Gentlemen ...I stepped forward, put on a "Gilligan" sailor's hat and sang, as the second verse:
The weather started getting rough ...at which time the largest of my co-singers took out a "Skipper's" hat and hit me over the head saying, "Sorry, little buddy." I then stepped back into line and we finished the song as originally written:
O, tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy
We finished to polite applause and lost the contest. Over the next hour, more than a dozen people came up to me to tell me "how funny and clever" the song was, but that they didn't dare laugh or vote for us because their bosses were there and their bosses hadn't been laughing. .............. I submitted my resignation the first day back from Christmas break.
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