"When I knew that my crop was irrevocably gone I experienced a deathly feeling which, I hope, can affect a man only once in a lifetime. My dreams and ambitions had been flouted by nature, and my shattered ideals seemed gone forever. The very desire to make a success of my life was gone. The spirit and urge to strive were dead within me. Fate had dealt me a cruel blow above which I felt utterly unable to rise."
-Lawrence Svobida, Farming the Dust Bowl
We got a little bit of a thunderstorm two nights ago. Picked up a little work. May be too little too late, but better than nothing.
If I were not in the middle of my semester, I'd be liquidating the business right now. I've already done some back of the envelope calculations. It doesn't appear that I could pay off all my debt, but I could pay off a chunk of it.
I am starting out, though, selling off anything that I think can be sold. For instance, the John Deere commercial tractor I bought a few years back has got to go. I still owe maybe $3,000 on the note, but it looks like it will sell for much more than that.
It's going to set a chain of events into motion. After that, I'll use the money to fix up some broken equipment and then sell it off. The business is being crushed by its debt burden right now. The equipment I'm selling off hasn't been used in years. That equipment will fix up other equipment, and so on. We have so much broken equipment sitting around the warehouse. It has broken over the past few years and there was just never any money to fix it.
Back when we were a much bigger company, before the downturn, we bought a lot of stuff to add capacity. However, we haven't needed any of this capacity since mid-2009. That's not a momentary lull. That's a permanent change of business conditions.
I'm also applying for jobs, as I've done for two years, now. My experiences are reminding me why I enrolled in law school. It's a tough job market if you're a former middle manager in your mid-40s. I'm too qualified for employers to want to hire me into lower and semi-skilled jobs, but my skills aren't specific enough to match jobs at a more appropriate level. The fact that I used to work in IT, and my skills are out of date is another problem.
That's why I enrolled in Law School. However, getting through Law School required that I made at least a little money in the business.
Right now, the business is really threatening to derail my entire life. The prospects are too horrific to even contemplate. Losing the house, declaring bankruptcy... to top it all off, the informal agreement that my soon-to-be ex and I had worked out is unravelling. I'm initiating divorce proceedings.
I hope I can get through this. It's just hard to think about. Right now, I need to pray that the business sustains itself at least to the middle of May. At that point, the semester will be over, and I can give myself the full-time job of liquidating everything.
In the mean time, I'll still try to sell off some stuff here and there. I need to focus on the semester, though. I need to at least get sufficiently good grades to finish out my 1L year. Doing that opens the possibility of transferring to a different school later, or picking up again after a layoff, should I need to drop out for a little while.
It is strange that it was this time last year that I was last confronted with the possibility of bankruptcy. Somehow, we managed to string together enough jobs to barely stay in business. We got enough business that we bumped along the bottom until December, when things really took a dive.
Winter never came around to save us. Now, our only hope is Spring rains. I'm getting to the point now where I'm becoming superstitious about this, though. Like we're just fated to fail.
I guess superstition is the way the mind deals with situations where the bulk of what's going to happen is totally outside your control. I didn't create the worst economy in 80 years. I didn't create the local economy. I didn't create the changes in the industry that have slowly raised costs and reduced our pricing. I sure didn't create this incredibly mild weather that's been a bane to my business for the past three years.
All I can do is continue to captain my battered ship as best I can. If we survive, we survive. If we don't, we don't. All I can do is the best I can do.
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