Update

Yay, I just went online to balance my checkbook and the charges from Trend Micro have disappeared. Apparently they reversed them before they had a chance to post so my money is back in my account!

Rant over, then.

Oh, and yesterday Keith comes home from work and says 'guess what happened today?' and I say 'did they fire everybody?' and he says YES. Not him, though, he still has a job. For now, anyway.

What's happening is that half of the people in their yard work on the coal side, where coal trains deliver coal to big silos and then trucks take the coal out of the silos and drive them to power plants here in the central valley. Well, some of the plants are offline and some are converting to other fuel, so right now there are no coal trains and no trucks needed to take coal to the power plants. They started shifting some of the guys around to the railcar division where Keith works, having him try to train somebody to weld. Most welders go to school to learn how to weld but management thought they could just whip out a welder in a day or two. Since these guys were from the coal division they decided to just go ahead a lay them off instead of keeping them on in the railcar division, so now instead of 14 people working in their yard, there are 7. They have enough train cars lined up to keep them busy through the summer and might have coal deliveries again in the fall, but we are both thinking that the company may just decide to shut the whole operation down since the railcar division is kind of an afterthought and the main reason for the plant to be there has always been coal delivery. Right now the railcar division is making somewhat of a profit, but half the guys that work there have been there for years and have become quite complacent and mostly just dick around all day, drinking coffee, taking naps, etc. The ones that go on the road looking for cars to repair have time wasting down to a science, they fake their paperwork and stop for long lunches and just kind of drive around all day. It frustrates Keith to no end because he is one of those people that take pride in their job and he keeps trying to tell these guys that the gravy train may just pull out of the station if nobody is doing their job. We'll see, maybe the layoffs of 7 people will be a wake up call for them, but who knows.

Time to spruce up that resume!