Yale Club in NYC

At Charlie and Sorina's wedding in NY

- Posted from my iPhone

Turkiye

It took some work, but we agreed on a destination for the honeymoon: Turkey. D originally wanted Croatia or Santorini (there were some other places mentioned, but I can't remember them now) and I wanted India, Japan, or central Asia. The deciding moment was when I went out to Brandeis to get a letter of recommendation from a former professor. He's Turkish, and while we were chatting, I mentioned that D and I were getting married. I brought D into his office and we all chatted about the honeymoon. I think at that point we were leaning toward Santorini (I wasn't thrilled about that, hoping to go somewhere a little bit more adventurous. In retrospect, as half of Greece is on fire and it's economy is exploding, Greece would have been pretty exciting after all). So my professor starts to pitch us Turkey and it turns out it has everything we wanted in a honeymoon. The more we looked into it, the more we loved the idea. So, I think the tourism board of Turkey owes Professor Erbil a finder's fee at the very least. I was in a mentoring program at Fidelity and my mentor was Greek. She also gave me honeymoon advice when we thought we were going to Santorini, but she just showed me the website of a hotel she liked (which was also way out of our price range). Professor Erbil recommended an itinerary and really got us excited. He talked about renting a boat with his college buddies for like $40 each (per day) and the boat had a captain and a cook who prepared all of their meals. They sailed around the coast and went fishing, drank, swam, and generally had an awesome time. I know it's just an anecdote, but Greece is currently bankrupt and destroying itself, while Turkey has set its sights on building a trillion dollar economy. I mean, thanks for democracy, Greece, but you sound like China. What awesome thing have you done lately?


We bought our tickets last week. We'll leave immediately after the wedding (when I was still at Fidelity and had less vacation time, we thought we'd have to wait until 2012 to honeymoon) and stay for 12 days. D knows the itinerary better than I do, but we're going to the coast, Cappadocia, and Istanbul for a few days. We'll rent a car at some point and drive across Turkey, north to south. We just got our applications in the mail for international permits. I'm really excited about that part of the trip. It'll be practice for when we dominate the Amazing Race. We just have to get our acts together and finally submit an application.

My awesome timing

I can't be faulted for my timing. My first job out of college was with IBT in Boston. Less than two years after I left for Japan, IBT was acquired by State Street and there were massive layoffs. I worked at NOVA in Japan until January 2007, right when management stopped getting regular paychecks. About a year later, the company was bankrupt and a bunch of Americans, Brits, Canadians, and Aussies were stranded in Japan without work. It was enough of a problem that Qantas Airlines agreed to reduce the cost of tickets home for stranded Australian nationals. My timing seems to have saved me once again. Three months after leaving Fidelity, I just found out that my group has been moved out of Boston to Smithfield, RI. A severance package is being offered to anyone who leaves, as well as a retention package to anyone who agrees to stay for at least 6 months, but it must be a hard decision for my friends who have been there a while. I think this is pretty common for Fidelity to do. It's been moving people from downtown Boston to Merrimack, NH and Smithfield, RI for a while now. The cost of staying in Boston is too high, and I think this is a way for Fidelity to shake out the older employees, who now make twice what the new hires do.

So, if you lived in the metro area like I do, here's how your life would have changed. I used to wake up at 6:30 to shower and eat breakfast. I'd leave the house by 7:30, take the Red Line to South Station, transfer to the Silver Line, get off at the WTC, and be at my desk before 8:20. We just bought a car, but that was because my new job pays more and I could afford to cover the car and the wedding. I would have needed a car to get to work, but I probably would have cruised used car lots instead of buying a brand new one. The drive from Davis to Fidelity's Smithfield office is 57 miles, most of which would be on the 95. I have no idea what outbound traffic looks like on the 95 at rush hour, but I think it's fair to say that my commute would have gotten longer. I feel like I really dodged a bullet here. I got in touch with old co-workers on Friday and they don't know what to do. A lot of them live on the North Shore and take public transit in. Man. My good luck is tempered by how badly I feel for everyone else.


Fidelity recently closed its Framingham office, and I think everyone there was either moved back to Boston (unlikely) or to one of the Boston satellite sites. That would have been an even harder move. I once heard a story from a co-worker that a group was moved out of Boston to North Carolina. Some employees, eager to keep their jobs, moved to North Carolina. A year or two later, those people who had moved were laid off. What a world.