End of the Line

"End of the line." What a statement that is. There is no debating what it means. It just is what it is. You cannot argue that it will go on. The train stops here, and there is no where else for it to go.

F.Y.I. This is Stream of consciousness not news format. If you don't like that, don't read it.

Friday night, as I was finishing a rout at Climb Nashville, I got a voice mail on my phone saying that CompUSA had reached the end of its line. The deal for the owner to sell to a "restructuring" firm had finally gone through and they immediately announced that they were shutting us down completely. Some key stores will be sold as is, but I am not sure, but I assume staffing will not transfer with the store. Others will simply be liquidated. Nothing like a few key people high up benefiting from the sale and everyone else being out of work.

At first, the back of my mind was entertaining the thought that this could be a prank my boss was playing, but he would not joke about something like this (we all knew it was coming sooner or later - my money was on 5-10 years; Gordon, you win with a bet of less than a year).

Later that evening as I arrived home after finishing a couple more routs, I checked the Google News search and found quite a few sites already reporting the late news. Shortly after that, the store manager called me in person to make sure I knew as much as she did at the time.

I didn't sleep at all that night.

I went into work Saturday morning and we still had no news (I was actually a bit earlier than usual, arriving at 7:45 AM for an 8:30 test session). As the day went on, more info was passed along including a termination date of Jan 30 - I don't have official paperwork, so who knows how much time I have left. I did the usual surf the web between checking testers in and out of the morning and early afternoon examination sessions. This gave me lots of time to send e-mails to people that have sent me job requests and leads in the past. I have several opportunities I'm researching and need to follow up on Monday morning.

Having not eaten in about 24 hours by 4 PM Saturday afternoon, I had a small snack and went to bed. I woke up at 3:30 AM this morning (Sunday) and have been sending more e-mails and have continued talking with the Nashville Linux Users Group about the situation. Everyone has their own ideas of what happened, but the short of it is that CompUSA couldn't adapt to the new business model computer parts sales has taken in the internet age. This being the case, we either had to close up a lot and restructure (they closed 128 stores in February of this year), or close completely (which is happening because the restructure wasn't handled correctly).

The Tech Shop is business as usual through the end of the year, at which point I assume we will be stopping operations completely after finishing up any open service requests. I don't have any info about whether or not this is the case, and I feel bad for anyone that has an extended warranty through CompUSA, as they no longer have a service provider unless CompUSA can really sell the TechPro service as they are planning to.

Now does everyone understand why I would not mention CompUSA as my employer in previous posts?