How Were You Fired?

IanBevan asks: "A couple of years ago, the company I was working for was taken over by a larger competitor. I was told, right up until the last minute, that my development job was safe. Shortly thereafter, our illustrious team leader issued a new project plan, and I discovered that all my tasks were suddenly due to finish in about one week's time. Not being a great believer in coincidence, I asked my boss if there was 'anything he would like to tell me'. Of course, there was. Looking back this seems quite amusing now, but it could certainly have been better handled by the PHBs. I was just wondering, how have other Slashdot readers discovered that they have become 'surplus to requirements'?"

Comments

Re:Here's a quiz...

[tomhudson]

Oh, come on. The answer depended on the version of dos and dbase you ran.

DOS limitations (in config.sys)

1. 5.0: files=99
2. 6.0 and up: files=255

dbase limitations

1. dBaseIV had a hard-coded limit of 99.
2. dBase5 had an (again) hardcoded limit of 255 (which you would never hit because you also lost 5 to dos, for a net of 250).
3. The default number of files open at one time with the compilers available in those days was 20 - 5 (again, stdin, stdout, stderr, aux, prn open at program start by dos by default)

So if you had answered them something along these lines, they would have been suffering from TMI.