No, I don't have amnesia. No, I didn't lose my badge today at work.

However, I've come to realize that in the last few weeks, I have lost an identity that I associated myself with. I've lost the unique identity of my group at work.

Almost 6 years ago, I joined a group at Sun called HES-CTE. "High End Services - Corporate Technical Escalations". I considered this organization to be like an elite strike team. We knew the complicated servers we supported as well or better than the engineering teams that designed them. We flew around the world on a moment's notice to fix the unfixable, to put our flaming customer issues at customer sites, to do whatever it took to get a customer running and save the business.

Since then we've been reorganized countless times, and with each successive organization change we lost a little bit of that "elite" status. But with this reorganization, the organization we had become, PTS (Product Technical Support), was finally buried along with whatever uniqueness we had left, and all ties with the past.

Our new Senior Director sent a memo out. To paraphrase, "We no longer escalate to PTS. There is no more PTS. There is no more call center. There is just TSC (Technical Service Center)." TSC is our new organization name.

While I think it's great we've broken down a lot of artificial barriers that used to exist between different groups, the fact that there is no real distinction between me who is a product specialist and the folks who answer the phones is a little sad from a personal point of view. It's like a step backwards. It's like losing something special, and the HES-CTE group I joined *was* special. Way back when. I think we took a lot of pride in what we did, because we knew we were the best and that our company depended on us as "The Last Line of Defense" (remember the movie "True Lies" and Arnie's character's organization?).

Tonight, I lift my glass to the memory of Sun's HES-CTE. To those who answered the call. To those of us who continue to try to carry its principles forward. Cheers.