{"id":4026,"date":"2012-08-03T23:56:13","date_gmt":"2012-08-04T03:56:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=4026"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:43:17","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:43:17","slug":"leaving-kodak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2012\/08\/leaving-kodak\/","title":{"rendered":"Leaving Kodak"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Kodak<\/a>I left Kodak in late 2004 — at least that is when I ended my employment there.\u00a0 Surprisingly to me, I am still “working on” (as your waitress likes to say when you have a few bites left on your plate) the process of taking leave of Kodak in my head.\u00a0 Just last night, I dreamed I was back at Kodak making emulsions.\u00a0 Bizarre, bubbly emulsions.<\/p>\n

In my waking hours, I routinely check the internet to see what has happened to Kodak, good and bad.\u00a0 Have there been more layoffs?\u00a0 Will Kodak emerge from bankruptcy?\u00a0 Will the board of directors ever see fit to fire CEO Antonio Perez, or will they give him a bonus? What are my old co-workers doing now?<\/p>\n

It’s not like I was a workaholic.\u00a0 It’s fair to say that I was employed there about ten years before I really got down to doing serious work, as any business with any kind of standards would define it today.\u00a0 Kodak really didn’t start demanding much from its workers (or its managers) until the mid-1980’s.\u00a0 That’s when the layoffs began.<\/p>\n

I finally kicked it into gear and thought I accomplished a lot in the last half of my career.\u00a0 But I bet there is little evidence of it now.\u00a0 That multi-million-dollar worldwide factory upgrade I worked on in 2000-2001, the project that seemed so important to Kodak’s future at the time, looks like a waste of money now.\u00a0 Half of the buildings where we installed the equipment don’t even exist anymore.<\/p>\n

Now I wish I had saved copies of a few of my technical reports and those prototype mixers I designed.\u00a0 It is hard for me to let creative efforts go, to acknowledge that things I devoted much thought and energy to are now, literally, dust.<\/p>\n

I remind myself that Kodak (and film buyers everywhere) paid my salary and helped us support a family, maintain a house, educate our children and prepare for our retirement.\u00a0 If nothing else I did there lasted, that has to count for something.\u00a0 Still, it’s sad to leave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I left Kodak in late 2004 — at least that is when I ended my employment there.\u00a0 Surprisingly to me, I am still “working on” (as your waitress likes to say when you have a few bites left on your … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4026"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28380,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4026\/revisions\/28380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}