'm not particularly emotionally mature. This is like saying that a nuclear explosion is not particularly stable.
Those who don't know me may be surprised, because I always try to hold my temper. Those who are nodding along because you know me, fuck you.
In March 2023, I found out that Dephion was going bankrupt. The reasons will make it into a funny short story about bureaucracy and the government and people later, but for now I am convinced they were unavoidable enough that I shouldn't feel betrayed.
The company I spent five years building was going down.
The next two months were a whirlwind. The trustee and his lawyer minions needed support. Potential funding sources needed to be wooed and warned of the complexity of what they were buying. Stuff had to be catalogued for the auction block.
People were mourning, so desperately that they even turned to me for counsel. They had lifeboat ideas. They wanted to know what they could do. Dephion was a special place, agile and mature, and filled with people driven by passion. Sure, we had the statistically unavoidable cunt or two, and an undead mass of wage slaves, but where it mattered Dephion was staffed with people who dreamed hard and knew how to turn dreams into reality.
It was - that's the key sentence. It is no more. Dephion went bankrupt.
kept myself busy, not out of some sense of duty, but because I didn't want to feel. So I helped the lawyers, and showered every time I shook hands with one. I catalogued and helped catalogue. I sat down and let people try to connect, offering enough support to keep them even-keeled, and trying to speak the truth at all times.
At no point did I allow myself to feel anything about the end of the first great project of the second half of my life. The one that felt like a failure because I had allowed myself to believe in it.
I'll never get to see the next version of TALOS, or use HABTIC as a smooth experience we fine-tuned on user feedback. YALLSZ died in its crib. I'll never get to see what else the guys and girls would come up with for the office, for their colleagues, for our souls.
Dephion fell two steps from victory. It collapsed under the strain of ambition, incompetent sales, and badly-timed government regulations that all but shredded its funding sources.
If any of those words sound like reason for congratulations, they aren't. Three months in, I'm still not certain how I feel about any of this. So many of my colleagues quickly and easily coalesced into a boss-hating posse that blames our founders for the bankruptcy.
I envy their clarity, their ability to so quickly sort through the tones of the primal scream of anguish that is to this day the only thing I feel when I think of the end of Dephion.
I've put nice words on it, even gave my colleagues a Martin Luther King accept-and-hope message about the end of things. There is nothing that certain inside me, nothing that clear cut. I want to smash the desk I'm typing at right now. Grab a crowbar from the workshop and smash cars in the parking. I want to headbutt half a dozen people, and our founders aren't on that list.
Dephion ended. Five years of late nights and early mornings and brilliant ideas and focused will to go on, down the drain. Reduced to a lawyer's checklist of liquidation assets. Inspiration and genius brought down to one long "the company's IP" list. All gone.
I packed my office. I needed a massive box to fit all my stuff. Presents from colleagues that ranged from a perfect replica of Lucille to a Batman vintage toy, and ran the gamut of absolutely awesome.
The box, it was the largest end-of-business box I ever packed. It my progress through the years can be tracked in a single metric, walk of shame box size would be it. Because it's been growing impressively.
And maybe focusing for a moment on what doesn't matter may help me through this. Maybe it's not by trying to understand things that I'll find sanity here, it's in the good old counting things.
I've done it for decades. From the time of the endless holiday car rides where counting the bumps on the road was refuge from what was going on in the car.
This one time, perhaps, I won't fight anything. I'll just sit here and count the stuff in the box for a minute or twenty, looping through until I can think about what's gone and I'm not getting back.
It's a big box, after all. I'll be counting for a while.