Perversely, it also protects me, since there are now 10 other people in the company doing small parts of my job, who all need to be in tune with me and my work and rely on me to make sure they meet their goals that are pinned to what I do.

Don't believe that for a minute.

I was doing 90 hours a week for PlayNetwork. In one 48-hour period I had a meeting in DC, a meeting in Dallas, a meeting in Laguna Beach and a meeting in Las Vegas (Dallas was chosen because it was the airport we could all book connections through on our way to other meetings). I saw an agenda for an executive board-level meeting that had "the kleinbl00 problem" on it at about item number seven. An efficiency expert followed me around for two weeks asking how I knew to do this, that and the other; about the eighth time I answered "folklore" she burst into tears.

I didn't understand until a week later when my CAD monitors were suddenly boxed up and shipped off to a job. Two days later they let me know they were laying me off. They made me organize my own going-away party, and then nobody came.

They lost $23m worth of contracts within six weeks.

Now - they'd probably made the decision that given the choice between the care and feeding of marquee projects like the ones I did and the care and feeding of two-speaker Starbucks hang'n'bang installs, they'd rather stick to the stuff they could pay any schlub to do. So "exiting" the market that they had hired me to build was probably a conscious decision. There certainly weren't enough people around capable of doing what I did - I'd seen the applications and of the 150 resumes, the only one that was a "maybe" was a guy I knew as a friend of a friend and that friend went "naah you don't want to give that guy any money to do anything he's an incompetent liar." The company definitely bit off more than they could chew, hired me to help munch, discovered that they needed four of me and then discovered that four of me were not available within five states of searching.

But I was still out of a job.

I would like to report the company ate shit not long after. But the fact of the matter is, they zombied on for another ten years, purchased by increasingly incompetent conglomerates until finally they were the ass-end of a licensing deal with Apple.

When I look 'em up on LinkedIn i still see a lot of names I recognize even now.