Welcome to Corporate America

So, as you may have guessed from the decrease in my blog postings lately, I have found a job and started work! And in this economy, that's nothing to sneeze at.

I won't be writing much about the details of my work life, since that's not what this blog is about. But, suffice it to say that I'm working in the financial district; that I feel quite firmly a part of the "business" world, which is new to me; that my company seems relatively shielded from the crisis in the financial markets; and that there is a 99% chance you have never heard of who we are or even what we do. (Ha, have I piqued your curiosity now?)

This is going to make a good story to tell my (potential future) children, though: "The week Mommy started her first full-time job, the stock market plunged 20%!"

Yes, I buck the trends. Everyone else in my generation moves to Portland because it's the cool new city; I moved away from Portland and went to San Francisco, which was the cool city for my parents' generation. To compete in the global economy, people are learning Spanish or Mandarin; I majored in French. We're in the worst economic straits since the great depression; I manage to get hired, working in business, no less!

As I said, I have reason to believe that my company is not in any immediate danger... however, it was not too encouraging to go into work my first day and see, on the whiteboard, a diagram of the bank failures and mergers that have taken place this year:


Left to right: Citi buys Wachovia; J. P. Morgan takes over WaMu and Bear Stearns; Bank of America takes over Merrill Lynch and Countrywide Financial; HSBC takes over Household International (happened several years ago, actually) and Wells Fargo and US Bank sit calmly off to the side...for the time being. Click photo to enlarge.