So yeah, I’m still pretty annoyed about Reader getting canned. But frankly my love for it was never the same after they gutted out all the social features, so I’m not as incandescent with rage as some folks. Just disappointed. In the ensuing Metafilter thread, people started sharing their lifetime stats (which you can see by hitting the “Trends” button in Reader). To my horror, my total was actually sitting on 299,987! So even though I’d decided to find a new service, I still had to scroll through 13 more items so I could hit the magical 300,000+ mark.

Anyway, pretty early on I decided that I was going to test out The Old Reader as a replacement. It was built after the “sharepocalypse” and it’s basically attempting to recreate the Google Reader utopia of four years ago. Of course, their site (along with every other cloud based reader) started getting hammered. I managed to get my import request in and it got processed overnight. Now I’m deleting old dead feeds and reorganising. Be warned – they’re still slammed and the site is going awfully slow. (They put up a blog post talking about their plans to cope with the influx of new users.) So far so good though!

So that’s the big news around here. Made redundant. Laid off. But “retrenched” sounds so much better, don’t you think? I’m going back to the trenches. It’s cool; I was actually quite relieved when they told me, and I wasn’t really surprised either. We didn’t get a couple jobs that had been planned, and there hasn’t been much for me to do in terms of my actual job title (Senior Business Analyst). So I spent the past several weeks doing QA, writing documentation, and worrying about when the axe would fall. Turns out it was this past Friday. But knowing is always better than not knowing, and I feel as if a stressful weight has been lifted. I’d already been sending out my CV to recruiters, and I’ve had a chat with someone at my DREAM JOB (which I’m not going to tell you about because it’ll totally jinx it). But I’m always up for new leads and opportunities. Here’s my LinkedIn page if you want to have a look. I’m obviously interested in Business Analyst roles, but preferably I’d like to get into Product Management if I can. Thanks in advance for tips and commiseration!

The Snook actually said to me: “They should have waited till next week. Then you could have a trophy for “Laid off on birthday” to go next to your “Laid off at Christmas” one.” BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!