So that sucking sound you're hearing is the brain trust taking off (well, being laid-off) from marchFIRST, leaving a vacuum of empty cubicles and tattered office supplies in its wake.

I already have two friend who have been let go in recent months, Ernie and Ken, and now it looks like East and West coast operations will completely shut down, possibly within the week, which means Karen will be joining the enforced exodus as well. The irony is (now I have to pause and think every time I use the word.. um, yep. It is irony in this case) Anyhow, the irony is that those who stayed on to the end will likely only get 2 weeks of severance pay, while those laid off earlier get 2 months. My friend Ernie, who left around March 8th, gets paid through May 8th, while Karen may only get paychecks through April 15th, despite having worked nearly a month more. C'est la vie.

Anyhow, this will likely mark the final scene in the ongoing USWeb saga. Five years ago I started working for a company called Ikonic Interactive on a contract assignment for a year. Shortly after I left to go work at CKS Partners, Ikonic was bought by USWeb and absorbed. A year later, USWeb and CKS merge to form reinvent USWeb/CKS. Shortly after that I took off, as management was getting boneheaded and two of my favorite people had gone off to start their own new company, Eleven Inc. Then came the Whitman & Hart merger (side note, for a long time I got Whitman & Hart confused with Wolfram & Hart, the fictitious super-evil law firm on Angel), and the renaming to marchFIRST (or m1 for short).

Anyhow, one of the rumors is that this is nothing so much as a messy divorce, or more accurately, uxoricide, as the bi-coastal operations that were USWeb/CKS will be killed, while the inland ops will quite possibly reform as Whitman & Hart.

Anyhow, you know you're in trouble when your stock has fallen from $80 a share to 13 cents, and Nasdaq halts trading until the company can give them further data on their viability as a company.

Further bulletins will follow, I'm sure...