As you’ve probably heard, IBM has recently done some layoffs. My grandmother has seen something on the news about it and called my mom at 8am on Monday morning to ask if I was impacted. [Unrelated aside: I was going to use the word affected here, but since I don’t know if it is effected or affected and most folks won’t grok [a|e]ffected I opted for impacted instead :) ] My mom assured her that “Casey is indispensable”. What I think is funny is that my mom turns around and calls me yesterday evening to validate that assessment. Guess she didn’t trust her judgment of my indispensableness! Just in case anyone else is reading this and concerned: thus far my project and my position have been spared.
The past two weeks I have been doing performance testing of the ITIM SAP adapter for a Large UK Bank (what’s with me and large banks?). Today I presented the findings to the bank. They were both glad to hear how well the adapter performs in our test environment and yet not so happy given how amazingly poorly it is working in their environment. I left them with a todo list on some steps to diagnose it. From here I’m leaving the customer in the very capable hands of ITIM Support.
At my management team’s request/orders I’m shifting my focus from customer issues to testing the performance of ITIM 5.1 which is still under development. I’m somewhat glad about this as it gives me an easy out for not getting involved in new customer issues and hopefully being able to decrease my involvement with existing customer issues. I’ve felt worn a little thin lately given the many customer issues I’ve been involved in the past several months. Granted, I haven’t yet determined how I’m going to transition out of some of the existing issues or who to hand them off to, something high on my todo list. Tomorrow I have a total of 9 calls with at least one every hour, sometimes two per hour. 5 of them are directly related to my new ITIM 5.1 work so I’m most certainly hitting the ground running. The ITIM 5.1 performance work is high enough profile to not only merit pulling me off customer issues but to also get me some help! My manager let me know yesterday that the Powers That Be decided to pull someone (Eme) off an already under-staffed sister project to help me with the ITIM 5.1 performance work. I’ve worked with Eme before and am thrilled to be working with him again as he is very intelligent, self-motivated, self-directing, and even interested in performance work!
Digital Ramblings 
I would lean toward “affected” here: you would have been influenced by the layoffs. Curiously, a quick Google search suggests “impacted” as a synonym for “affected” in this case. :-)
Glad to hear your unemployment was not effected by the layoffs, though.
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Congrats for making it through another round, Casey. FWIW, effect is almost always used as a noun, so if thinking of it as “the effect” seems like it would be right, then it usually is.
About the only time effect is not used as a noun is in a phrase like, “that will effect change in the organization,” in which case it IS effect, even though it’s a verb instead of a noun. Hope that helps.
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Congrats on not getting the axe and on getting a new work partner you like! Glad to hear that you’ll be an IBMer for a while longer. Although, there are some pretty sweet positions in DC!!! :)
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