So here's an interesting little development: Uchenna's company announced that it is shutting down the Ponca City facility. All positions not directly connected to the refinery (a total of 700 jobs) will be reviewed and/or relocated. Yup, that includes us.
As you can imagine, the town is a-buzz. No matter where you go, that's all you hear people talking about. We're all comparing notes about the effect on this small, one-company town, for one thing. Because it's not like just 700 people will be leaving, they'll be taking spouses and children as well. Schools will consolidate--though many teachers are company spouses, so maybe the reduction in kids and the loss of teachers will sort of balance out. In our not-very-big ward, sixty people are directly affected, including most of the leadership.
Besides the sheer number of people leaving, those affected are a good portion of the professional population in town, those with more education, higher wages, and good health insurance. Retail, restaurants, and all the other support services will shrink, presumably. My friend at church, a doctor's wife, wonders if she's going to want to stick around this future ghost town.
Imagine roughly 700 houses coming on the market at once with no reason for anyone else to move in. We have a friend who had been renting and was now in process of buying. When the announcement came out, he called his boss and said, "I have a house under contract. What do you recommend?" His boss said, "I'd cancel the contract and walk away from the earnest money." So he did. The realtor said that, in fact, all of their contracts have, one by one, just been cancelled.
Fortunately, when the company relocates personnel, they promise to buy the home if the homeowner can't sell within three months. They're going to be buying a lot of homes. They promise to pay fair market value, at a guaranteed minimum of what the homeowner originally paid. Shwew. It's not like our house would have appreciated in the last nine months anyway. We're also glad we weren't, like, super motivated and went around making upgrades or repairing the roof or anything. This is one time that lack of effort and responsibility actually paid off.
I should say that fueling all the speculation is the company's lack of specifics. This announcement was just a heads-up; details will come at the end of January. But when jobs are "reviewed" that really means "cut." Which positions? And for those relocating, where are they relocating to? And when? Houston and Bartlesville are the two main possibilities (Bartlesville is just an hour due east of Ponca City. There's been a lot of traveling between the two sites, so a consolidation does make sense). But the company has facilities around the country.
Just so you know, we're 85% - 90% confident we'll keep our job, but 100% sure we'll be moving. Bye-bye pretty house.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
It's almost over
Okay, I don't have a sign in my front yard, and I haven't called anyone to promote any position (though here's a big, proud shout-out to all of you Californians doing those hard things for the "Yes on 8" campaign). Also I complain loudly about the candidates' commercials. But I'm proudly wearing my "I Voted" sticker. Some of us have the best of intentions, but registering to vote and finding our way to the polling station is about all we can handle. So we're proud of what we do accomplish.
Uchenna was so disgusted with me (in a sweet, loving way of course) because I didn't vote in the last presidential election. Whereas he stayed up to 1 in the morning to watch the election returns, and then was so upset with the result that he couldn't sleep that night, I (living in Utah but still registered in California) found getting that absentee ballot just too complicated. In the last mid-year election I had a Utah driver's license, but apparently you can't wait until just a week before the election to register.
So he knew if our family was going to have a voice in this election, he was going to have to do some gentle but persistant prodding. Good thing, too, because just registering is one of those notorious multi-step processes. Okay, registering itself is very simple, although the deadline is about a month before the election, so you have to think ahead (which, as I said, was a problem I'd had before).
Before you can register in a new state, though, you have to have a local driver's license. That always takes some doing. Here, as long as your old license hasn't expired, you don't have to take a test (shwew!), but I did feel like it was a test to find the armory, which houses the local DMV most mornings. To pay your $25 and get your picture taken, you then go to the tag agency, on the other side of town. I knew where that was, though, because I'd registered the car there. Good thing, too, because to get your driver's license, you first have to get your car registered in-state.
Here's a sidebar question: what do you do with old license plates? We seem to be getting a little collection of them. I guess we can just trash them, as we did with the Tercel plates (they were so rusted we ended up ripping them off the car in sections). But something so official, and, you know, metal, doesn't seem like it can go so casually into the trash. Like there should be a designated collection site or disposal ceremony or something. Just kidding. Sort of.
For a yet further digression, I'd like to point out that, as this state only gives you one plate, which goes on the back of the car, we have a blank spot on the front that feels a little weird. A lot of people around here put in something decorative, supporting OSU or OU, for instance. And there's the ever-popular OSU and OU combined, with the words "A house divided." I wonder how that would go over with BYU and UofU.
But back to voting. I did it. Maybe next time I'll even volunteer at a polling station. Or put up a sign. Although I'd be tempted to post the democratic presidential candidate with the republican senetorial candidate, or vise versa, just to show how independent-minded I am. Or to confuse people. But would they think I'm making a satirical, mocking statement on the whole system? Maybe I'd better just stick to voting and not get carried away.
Uchenna was so disgusted with me (in a sweet, loving way of course) because I didn't vote in the last presidential election. Whereas he stayed up to 1 in the morning to watch the election returns, and then was so upset with the result that he couldn't sleep that night, I (living in Utah but still registered in California) found getting that absentee ballot just too complicated. In the last mid-year election I had a Utah driver's license, but apparently you can't wait until just a week before the election to register.
So he knew if our family was going to have a voice in this election, he was going to have to do some gentle but persistant prodding. Good thing, too, because just registering is one of those notorious multi-step processes. Okay, registering itself is very simple, although the deadline is about a month before the election, so you have to think ahead (which, as I said, was a problem I'd had before).
Before you can register in a new state, though, you have to have a local driver's license. That always takes some doing. Here, as long as your old license hasn't expired, you don't have to take a test (shwew!), but I did feel like it was a test to find the armory, which houses the local DMV most mornings. To pay your $25 and get your picture taken, you then go to the tag agency, on the other side of town. I knew where that was, though, because I'd registered the car there. Good thing, too, because to get your driver's license, you first have to get your car registered in-state.
Here's a sidebar question: what do you do with old license plates? We seem to be getting a little collection of them. I guess we can just trash them, as we did with the Tercel plates (they were so rusted we ended up ripping them off the car in sections). But something so official, and, you know, metal, doesn't seem like it can go so casually into the trash. Like there should be a designated collection site or disposal ceremony or something. Just kidding. Sort of.
For a yet further digression, I'd like to point out that, as this state only gives you one plate, which goes on the back of the car, we have a blank spot on the front that feels a little weird. A lot of people around here put in something decorative, supporting OSU or OU, for instance. And there's the ever-popular OSU and OU combined, with the words "A house divided." I wonder how that would go over with BYU and UofU.
But back to voting. I did it. Maybe next time I'll even volunteer at a polling station. Or put up a sign. Although I'd be tempted to post the democratic presidential candidate with the republican senetorial candidate, or vise versa, just to show how independent-minded I am. Or to confuse people. But would they think I'm making a satirical, mocking statement on the whole system? Maybe I'd better just stick to voting and not get carried away.
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