The Big Exit, It all went Poof #

Somewhere along the way, M1 was bought up by a company out of Chicago called One, Inc. that was buying software company across the USA and trying to be a specialized CRM shop. Their original plan was to IPO the whole concept and turn it into a public company. However, the timing for that was all wrong as the dot com boom was coming to an end and many companies needed to start making some actual money or die.

When the Investment company that was funding this venture realized that the original CEO that was putting this together did not have a real plan to make a profitable company out of all these companies that were acquired, there was a changing of the guard. The new CEO was really pushing for everyone to be trained in various CRM systems and turn us into sales people. I was lucky in that I got onto some high profile projects that actually paid and was able to avoid the useless exercise that this was heading into.

One day we get a surprise visit from someone from Chicago Headquarters. He called for a staff meeting in the large conference room (which we nick named as the meat cooler, cause no matter what the temperature, this room was always freezing.) In that meeting he announced the One, Inc was no more and we had until 5:00 pm to exit the premises.

One of the things that M1 and now One, Inc was providing for me was a Green Card (Permanent Residency). They had a law firm working on the paperwork. Even before I called Mary to give her that bad news, I called up the law office to let them know what was going on. We were going with the premise that I would just ride on my TN permit until my Green Card process was completed so a work permit was never filed. However, with my current employer no longer in operation I was in a bit of a pickle as I could not apply for other work without this work permit and they take upwards of six weeks to complete. They then began the paperwork to file for a work permit while my Green Card was still being processed.