Company in Financial Crisis

Angelika Blaxxun, the company for which Michael works, has recently closed its office in San Francisco. But I have to give some background information, otherwise nobody will understand me.

First of all, one must know that Blaxxun is funded by an American investor, both the office in Munich and the office in San Francisco. Since Blaxxun is a relatively new and small company and develops completely new software, the financial situation is not as secure as with global companies such as Siemens or Microsoft (Michael would now be pulling his hair out at my examples, since he is not exactly a fan of these companies). In plain language, this means that it needs to turn a profit at some point. Unfortunately, Americans are not currently interested in the things that Blaxxun develops; the Germans, however, are. So the American sponsor decided on the spot that the office in San Francisco would be closed and all his hopes would be placed on the office in Munich. The consequence is that all employees in San Francisco were dismissed on May 15th. For us, this would have meant that we would have had to pack our bags immediately (and I had just finished unpacking everything and hanging the pictures on the wall), since our residence permit and Michael's work permit are completely linked to the company America.

Now, you are probably wondering why we are still here. Don't worry, I'm getting to it, I just wanted to make it a bit exciting. So, we have just been incredibly lucky. Michael and his colleague Peter are the only ones still working for the American company. This is possible because the American headquarters still exists. The company in America now only has two employees instead of 30. The finances are secured until the beginning of 1998, but since there are some projects running in Germany, it is very likely to be even longer. So, if you were paying close attention, you are probably wondering where Michael is working now since there is no office in San Francisco anymore. The office is now, so to speak, in our apartment, i.e. Michael is working from home. You can imagine it like this: in our bedroom there is a huge desk with two computers and an additional laptop. I really hope that we don't get in each other's way in our small apartment, but as long as we can stay here and I don't have to play Michael's secretary, I'm fine with it.

Michael will now calmly wait out the situation. Everyone of course hopes that the company will make a big breakthrough. But if the situation continues to worsen, Michael will try to find a new job here in San Francisco. That is not easy though. There is plenty of work, but a new company would have to obtain a new work permit for Michael, which can take two months. An American company is usually used to the new employee being able to start immediately due to the lack of notice periods. It doesn't help that Michael has already worked here. The case would be treated completely new again. Long live bureaucracy!!!!

I hope you were able to follow my somewhat lengthy explanations and for those who found my explanations too long, I will quickly write Michael's brief summary of the situation: "Everything remains the same, except now I can even work from my bed!"

Despite having more luck than sense in hindsight, the situation was still quite stressful. The problem is that you can lose everything along with your job here, health insurance being the most critical part. As a foreigner, Michael wouldn't have been able to get unemployment benefits anyway, and even for Americans it's barely enough to get by. We really wouldn't have had any other choice than to go back to Germany, and we didn't want to do that because we had just settled in. A sure sign that we had become real Californians is, for example, that we had already slept through the last minor earthquake of magnitude 3.4 and only heard about it because my friend Sylvi called in a state of excitement to ask if we had noticed anything and if we were all right.