My wife is damn giddy about it. I, along with almost everyone else in my group, got laid off from Enron in March of this year, and at that time my wife said to me "A pox on Enron. We will live to see them fail." Of course, she was joking about it, but it's damn spooky that it came true.
She doesn't like them because they had intended to lay us off on Friday, but since my wife and I were at the hospital having a baby, they decided to wait three days until Monday to do it. A real class act, I tell you... [rolleyes] I got the page that I had a mandatory meeting that Monday as we were headed to lunch to celebrate the new baby with our family. Anyway, we at least got a great severence package, but it still made me mad because I was rated as one of the top 15% of employees during our annual review, yet got literally no bonus and no raise, but was told I would be moving into a mangement position if one became available because I had what it took. I never got the chance, and have been moving from contract job to contract job since I was let go. My stock options strike price was whatever it was on Dec. 29 of 2000, which I believe was $87.25. I guess I'm glad I didn't get to stick around long enough for those options to vest.
And what Coz_45-age-caliber said about their management is correct. I know EXACTLY who he's talking about when he talks about the screaming manager. Enron, as powerful as they were, had some of the most shortsighted and idiotic management I have ever seen. Broadband was doomed to failure because they had extremely weak management and absolutely no direction. Spending money like it was going out of style on frivilous things wasn't a good business idea either. The director who was responsible for raping my group let it be known that it was completely political, as he never saw a need for us anyway (Data/Infosec). Two weeks after we were gone there were public incidents about Chinese and Brazilian hackers breaking into the Enron Broadband network and causing problems. The person responsible ended up getting fired shortly afterwards because he finally screwed up ont too many times and got popped for sexual harassment, not to mention that they were already unhappy with the things he had done.
On one hand, I'm happy to see the company crumble and the execs being looked at for illegal activities, because many of them participated in the type of trading and stock purchasing that we were unable to do by company policy. I couldn't buy stock for any company we did business with, yet almost all of the Execs held stock in those companies.
On the other hand, I know it's going to screw the Houston economy over more than it already is, plus I hate to see all those people face the same uncertainty I did. I still have lots of friends over there.
God Bless Texas