Great blogging restart by a former corpo-friend (still friend, no longer corpo) who has some GREAT tips for taking baby for his first photo session -- basically don't expect much in the way of cute smiles, and don't bother dressing them, because mostly they stare a lot and get so hot you have to strip them down to a diaper.
With all that said, What a CUTIE!
I first met our heroine and new mom blogger when she was about 8 months pregnant. She was working for one of our clients-at-the-time while I was toiling away at my former-never-really-a-partnership-joke's-on-me gig. I liked her right away. Smart. Funny. Hard worker. Deadline meeter. No BS. A real person.
And to make it better--she'd read my blog! She confessed at our second meeting in an aside that she blogged too, but hadn't been keeping up with it for some time. I told her, "Blog! Blog!."
Something witty like that. My standard cheer for bloggers.
So anyway, to make a long story short, we whipped together a pretty intensive 70? 80? 90? -page web site for the company in record time -- me doing most of the writing she doing the design and content management stuff . The site launch went great... was it the week before Christmas? Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Launch a Site Today... It went live just in time to meet the required deadline, for a trade show if I remember right. All the copy was there. The design looked great! Everyone was pleased. We did it! High Fives--nice job said the emails of congratulations.
The next day, she was laid off.
I found out the afternoon it happened. I found out later that they tried to jerk her out of her full severance. How's two weeks sound when you're just about to deliver a baby?
Nice, right? Holidays. Pregnant. Pretty good chance if that's you YOU ARE NOT going to get hired until after you have the baby and go through a respectable period of continuous lactation and baby-love. You get lots of time to think, you get COBRAs, you get lots of special things during your (what quickly becomes an unpaid) maternity leave.
But that's business. Layoffs happen. Two-week severances happen. Illness happens. Births and deaths happen. The bottom line marches on.
We had another project scheduled to begin with that client the next week. A meeting had been scheduled to kick it off. I was supposed to attend. For me it meant hours = $.
I decided to resign the account and handed it back over to my at-the-time business partner. I couldn't walk in there agreeing to tell a story about a brand that couldn't even tell itself the truth.
What I did is not what everyone should, would or could do. Under different circumstances, I might not have given up the work. Although, my circumstances at the time were pretty dire. So yeah, turning it down did have an impact financially. More than that, for me, it sealed the deal for my unpartnering that followed from the company I helped build.
That's why it's extra special cool to see that sweet baby's face. And to know that my friend is blogging again.
All I can say is, "Blog! Blog!"
Tags: maternity leave, layoff, corporate values, severance, shitty thing to do, web design = Powered by Qumana
