# It's been a strange old couple of weeks. The situation at Chrystal, far from becoming clearer, has become more and more murky. Rumour and innuendo fly hither and yon, such that nobody knows anything. Little T, the Xerox exec charged with winding up Chrystal, seems intent on making Xerox look absolutely as bad as he possibly can.

When companies are wound up, it's not uncommon for the company assets to be sold off. Chrystal, unsurprisingly, has a number of computers, and some of the soon to be ex-employees enquired about buying them. One employee, let's call him Mr P, offered £300 quid for the laptop he'd been using. You can buy a brand new Dell luggable for £600, so that sounded pretty generous to me. Bear in mind also, that companies can write-off computer expenses complete in the frist year, rather than over three years like normal assets. Consider also that the laptop in question is not one that the main Xerox corporation will support, so it can't go back there. Essentially, therefore, this is a computer with no value at all to Chrystal. The three hundredd quid being offered is, then, money for nothing. Little T said The sale price on these units to our employees will be one-half of current book value or $1150. This is not a negotiable item. Looks like those computers will finish up in a landfill somewhere.

That's a comparatively minor example of corporate fuckwittedness, especially when you look at the way clients are being treated. Some of them have spent a lot of money having Chrystal write software for them, and now find that they may as well have thrown that money down the toilet for all the good it will do them. The letter I've seen, which I'm told is the one going to the clients, runs to about 140 words and essentially says you're shafted. From what I hear (rumours remember), the only piece of software that the vestigial Chrystal organization will support is the latest release of the Astoria database. Run your website using Chrystal's Eclipse? You're fucked. Build your translation workflow using Lingua? You're fucked. Rely on the bridges to connect your XML editor to Astoria? You're fucked. Done almost any kind of useful work with Chrystal products? You're fucked. Chrystal won't help you. And no, you can't have source code access either, so you can't help yourself either. The letter predictably blames increased competition and a soft economy. Bollocks. Remember Mr. Garnett's strong background of successful leadership and innovative strategies will help lead Chrystal Software's continued growth.

I could go on, but you get the picture. I enjoyed working for Chrystal, but the way the company's acting now is arrogant, wrongheaded, and makes the people running it look like a bunch of cunts. When the client companies I've been dealing with get in touch and ask what's going on, I have to tell them I don't know. They trusted me to help solve their problems, and I've let them down. That makes me look like cunt too. Thanks, Xerox!

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