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Quote of the Day: Historia Calamitatum
The title of this post may look like rather esoteric, bluestocking, or even erotic clickbait, but there’s nothing to that theory. It’s not a feminist take on the story of poor Peter Abelard, and no guy ends up minus an essential piece of equipment at the end of it. No. It’s just a rumination on one of the dumbest things I ever did in my life (that I’m willing to cop to, at least), and how I got past it, beyond it, and how it all turned out for the best. (It’s also, perhaps, an object lesson in heeding the warning signs, something else I’m not always very good at.)
It’s the story of the time I decided to live out my career dream by moving, with Mr. She, from Pittsburgh, PA to Boulder, CO, and how my grand gesture lasted for at most 72 hours, after which I high-tailed it home with my tail between my legs (not sure how both of those things are possible at the same time, but I managed it). It’s a story of running away, a story of forgiveness, of sticking with your loved one, and of putting the pieces back together after my imaginary world crumbled and (h/t Elizabeth Taylor, and today’s runner-up Quote of the Day): “I fell off my pink cloud with a thud.”
My story begins in 1977, just after I’d completed two years of “indentured servitude” (as the governor of the great state of Virginia might describe it), or worse, in the English Department’s graduate program at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. I was absolutely sure I wouldn’t have any trouble finding a job and starting to pay my own way in the household. We were penurious, and didn’t even have the proverbial nickel to stick in each other’s eyes, and we lived in a run-down little hovel (is there any other kind?) right on top of the exhaust vents of the Liberty Tunnels, among the drug dealers, the dog fighters, the knife-throwers, and the motorcycle gangs. (I liked the motorcycle guys. They were, by and large, a pretty decent bunch.) Also among the denizens of the dead-end street were a few hardy working-class souls who’d lived there all their lives and refused to move. They were lovely people. But the neighborhood was, in a word, insalubrious, and one might even say, deplorable, in the non-political sense. (As of 2019, most of it’s been razed or condemned, together with what was left of its inhabitants, I’m sure.)
I thought I’d easily be able to get a job as a technical writer. At the time, Pittsburgh was still in the top tier of cities with corporate headquarters and there were dozens of places just dying to hire me (I believed, lol). I loved writing, even then, and have always had some facility turning technical specifications into readable and comprehensible prose. I was pretty sure I would be seen as God’s gift to Koppers, or Rockwell, or US Steel, or Bayer, or one-or-another local corporate HQ. Such was not to be; once a prospective employer discovered that my background and degree was in English Literature and that the letters “BS” (of any sort) didn’t feature in my resume anywhere, that was that. “Get some business or technical experience,” they’d say, “and come back in a couple of years.”
So, I signed up with a temporary agency, and temped for a year, before finding my feet as the receptionist and assistant bookkeeper at a small law firm in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh (for the princely salary of $500/month). Answering the phone. Making coffee. Checking the court calendar in the Pittsburgh Legal Journal every day to make sure our attorneys were where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there. And after I’d been there about a year, the firm purchased a piece of word processing equipment. It was the start of 1979.
I fell in love. It could count! It could sort! It could cut and paste! It could outline! It could do proportional spacing! It could spell check! It could do footnotes! It made revising long legal documents easy! (All of these things, and more, were unheard of at the secretary level at the time). I was on the cutting edge of office automation, and I simply thrived. Another year went by, at the end of which I was hired by the word processing company as a support representative and trainer. There was no such thing as “end-user support” at the time, and the company was looking for (women) employees with presence, a teaching background, and that ability I mentioned, to take technical capabilities and concepts and make them useful in the working lives of 1979’s secretaries and administrative assistants). That’s what I was hired to do.
I loved my job, and when, in the Spring of 1983, the company offered me a promotion, to work with their internal training program at the headquarters in Boulder CO, I jumped at the chance. Things were in a bit of a jumble at home, I felt as if I really couldn’t go any further in the local office, the money was attractive, and yes, there was an element of running away from chaotic personal issues, tragedy, and some difficult family situations. Between all that and the optimism of youth (I was 28 at the time), I was sure that if I just closed my eyes and made the leap 1500 or so miles West, things would get better, my troubles would disappear, and we would all live happily ever after.
Mr. She was enthusiastic about the move; a hiker, rock climber, ice climber and mountaineer (he summited Mt. Rainier in 1974), he loves the West, and the mountains, and was thrilled at the prospect of moving. The university was very accommodating, and suggested he apply for a semester’s sabbatical (the first in his 20+ years of teaching) to do some writing. He did, and was therefore not tied down by a teaching schedule in the Fall of 1983.
Our plan was coming together! We would drive out to CO early in April, over the school’s Easter break, taking minimal necessities for me, and I would stay at the hotel suggested by the company, till I found an apartment, at which point, I would start looking for a house. I’d keep the car, Mr. She would fly back to Pittsburgh, where he’d finish out the semester, and then we’d coordinate the full move over the summer. Easy peasy!
We got everything ready, and early in the morning of Thursday, March 31, we started on our Great Trek West.
And this is where I should have started to pay attention to the omens.
What a frightful journey. Terrible weather. Terrible accidents on the Interstates. Storms and tornadoes. The Mississippi River burst its banks. A bridge was out, causing a lengthy detour. More accidents. More storms. Roads closed due to dangerous conditions. Fortunately for once, our own vehicle behaved itself and held up pretty well (the episode where the crankshaft fell out in the middle of the road didn’t happen till about a year later).
And, finally, we made it to Denver on April 3. To discover that a railroad tank car had ruptured, spewing a huge, thick yellow cloud of nitric acid over downtown and the surrounding environs. Thousands of people had to be evacuated, roads were closed, traffic was rerouted, and the only reason the consequences were not far worse was–the 50mph winds and a gigantic snowstorm that bore down from the Rockies shortly after it happened. By the time we arrived in Boulder, several hours later (normally, it’s a 30-minute drive), there were about two feet of snow on the ground.
I’ve never been so glad to see the insides of a rather ordinary hotel room, take a shower, and fall into bed, in my life.
The next morning, we woke up, had breakfast, staggered out to the car, cleaned off the snow, got out the directions telling us how to drive to the company, and my new job, and very carefully made our way there.
At this point, things really started to go haywire.
No one was there. All there was, was a sign on the gate saying that the company was closed due to the weather. We drove back to the hotel (no cell phones). I called the company switchboard. No answer. I called my new boss’s phone, no answer. I called the office in Pittsburgh. Answer! But not much help, or much they could do. So we spent the day reading and twiddling our thumbs, watching TV at the hotel, and going out to eat at any place that was close enough that we could walk to.
That evening, I did something I’ve never done in my life before or since: Mr. She and I watched a college basketball game. And thus it is that I can tell you the winner of the 1983 NCAA Tournament, NC State, the coach of the winning team, Jim Valvano, and the MVP of the game, Akeem Olajuwon. Those are the only three facts of any kind I know about college basketball, and my fever dream is that I’ll be on Jeopardy one day and have the chance to put my knowledge to good use and win tons of money. (Not likely, I know. Sigh.)
The next morning, the day before Mr. She was due to fly back to Pittsburgh, we repeated the previous morning’s performance to the same effect. No one at work. No one answering the phone. Nothing to be done. (Note that the people in what was then called “Personnel” knew I was coming, my new boss and several others knew I was coming, and they all knew where I was staying, because they’d recommended the hotel). But, crickets, on my end.
Now, I was starting to go seriously wobbly, a state of mind which culminated in my “falling off my pink cloud with a thud” and in an epic crying jag at about 2AM.
“What on earth is the matter,” asked Mr. She, as I’d woken him up (not something that’s easily done when he’s sleeping the sleep of the just, trust me). “I hate it here!! I just want to go home!!” I bawled.
Truth be told, my darling husband’s first reaction was not all that supportive, nor can it be revealed here. But I think he recognized genuine distress when he saw it, so we started to talk. And we agreed that, perhaps this move wasn’t really such a good idea, and that perhaps we should go home and face, work on, and work out, our family issues there. And that even though I wouldn’t have a job at first (my position at the company had been filled before I left), we’d be OK and we’d make ends meet somehow.
So, the morning of April 6, we packed everything up and drove to Stapleton International Airport. Mr. She made his flight, and I made one more attempt (from a pay phone) to call the company, to tell them this time that I was resigning. No answer.
No matter. I got in my car, and drove East, hell-for-leather, not stopping on that first day until I reached Greenfield, KS. The following morning, from my hotel room, I finally got an answering machine on my boss’s line at the company. I left a message. And that’s how I resigned from one of the nicest jobs I never had, at what had been one of the nicest companies I ever worked for.
Two days later, I made it home to my family; 1571 miles in three days. Crying and sniffling most of the way.
Thank God for the university’s prescient sabbatical offer to Mr. She. He still had a job, and we still had a house (a crummy one, but a house, nevertheless). So we started to sort things out. I quickly came to realize that I’d been wrong in thinking that I could run away from my problems, that somehow transporting myself across the continent would make them go away, or would make them better, and Mr. She and I, and the kids, and the family, simply plowed through them to the other side.
I was lucky on the job front. My former boss recommended me for a similar position to my old one, at another office automation company. It was on the ropes, and folded after a year, but it was a port in a storm, and a fork in the road, so I took it. From there, I went into sales (PCs were the hot new thing, and was my introduction to them), and then in 1986, one of my customers, a VP at a local hospital, recruited me to manage PC support at his organization. And three years after that, a position at much lower pay, but much closer to home, opened up at my local community hospital.
I was there for twenty years, in a job I loved, with co-workers and employees I loved, and a boss I loved. Everything just clicked, from the first interview forward. (At the second interview, one of the department managers (I’d soon become his peer), jocularly remarked, as people often did at the time, that the mainframe was where all the important stuff got done, and that my PCs would always be “just toys.” I, just as jocularly, responded that, in time, his mainframe would make a nice little node on my huge network. By the time we both retired (on the same day in 2010), you know whose prediction had come to pass, don’t you? We’re still friends, though.
It seems I’m a much better predictor of technology direction than I am of human nature. Oh well.
So that’s the story of the time that Mr. She and I lived in Boulder for 72 hours. I’ve mentioned it a few times, and a few of you have asked me to tell it, so here it is. It was a humbling experience. A learning experience. And, in the end, a family experience. As tough as it was while I was changing jobs (it sometimes seemed) every ten minutes, we hung in together. I don’t think Mr. She ever mentioned my terrible faux pas again, once I got home, and he concealed what I’m sure was some disappointment at not having the opportunity to move to a part of the country that he loves far more than that in which he finds himself today.
Yet, today, thirty-six years later, here we still are.
Please don’t tell me that none of you have ever done anything this daft. Something that seemed like such a good idea at the time, with good intentions, and then it’s gone pear-shaped or sideways right quick. Surely I’m not the only one? If not, perhaps you could share, so I don’t feel quite so alone?
PS: By the time I pulled into my driveway, after my madcap dash back across the country, the company stock had lost about 30% of its value. They never recovered, and the sudden and unexpected ascendancy of the IBM PC put my little company, and many, many others, out of business in very short order. As it turned out, I made, at the end, exactly the right business decision, as well as the personal one.
Well, if we are talking about a dumb (in retrospect) career move, I can tell mine.
I worked for about 8 years at an industrial control company and did the digital design and programming for their first “all digital’ product. It was designed for multi-zone temperature control for applications such as plastic extrusion.
Although our product had an operator interface, it was fairly limited and just designed to set parameters for various temperature zones and show a summary of the result as an error bar graph. This was usually pretty dull, since the errors were typically very small.
At some point I added a serial interface to allow another computer to read values and change parameters using a computer terminal. My company did not make a product to do this and I spent a lot of time explaining to small “garage shop” vendors how to do best do the interface for their local customers.
I decided that there was a market in filling this need and left the company to start my own consulting company. When I left, I had no contracts pending, since that didn’t seem “ethical”, somehow. I also didn’t mention this detail to my wife, since I had a house and kids to support and thought she would worry too much.
I was loved by my old company’s sales team, since teaming a “Brown box” (my last name is Brown) with the control product made a lot of sales much easier for them.
One other ‘dumb’ thing I did was initially to charge the customers on delivery. This meant that I fronted all of the equipment costs and the better my business got, the worse the cash flow got.
I managed to make a go of that for several years until the Engineering department of my old company finally recognized the market they had been ignoring and started making a similar product. At that point things got awkward and I starting doing more standard computer consulting.
Although it was a dumb decision, it worked out in the end.
@she How could you ever consider leaving a place with a view of this majestic historical landmark? Renovation of this building along with the “Tubes” was my last major project before I retired, so I am somewhat familiar with your old neighborhood.
How funny. Small world. Albert St. All the way down at the bottom of the hill. Last house, at the dead end. It had easy access to the streetcar tunnel, which was handy while we only had one car and I was working in Pittsburgh. And a double lot. I made a nice garden. Bought it for $7,200 in 1978. Mortgage payment, IIRC, was $97/month. I had my purse snatched while walking up the steps and back home one evening. Not a pleasant feeling. We also had a burglary at the house, one evening when we were out. A lot of computer (Atari 400-type) stuff stolen as well as a lot of my jewelry and treasures, none of which was particularly valuable monetarily, but which had considerable sentimental value.
Serendipity. That’s the best.
Here’s a New York Times article about my word processing company (NBI), from 1982. At that time, it was riding high. Honestly, it was the finest, and most compact bit of programming for word processing I’ve ever seen in my life, and if someone could resurrect the kernel, anywhere from Level C to Level G, today, they’d have a clear winner. It did just about everything that contemporary versions of Word could do. Its only limitations were hardware. The screen couldn’t really do WYSIWYG; you had to trust it on snaking columns, or what we would today call “tables,” that if you gave it the correct instructions, the printed output would come out as you wanted. It was (I think) the only product on the market that showed scientific equations on the screen with the Greek characters. As a result of that, it had the scientific markets sewn up, and there were plenty of them in Pittsburgh–most prominently, Westinghouse. It also had a huge market with government agencies, as it supported Tempest. (Couple other stories involve the time I was (AFAIK) the only low-level non-US citizen ever admitted to the premises of the Westinghouse Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory to help with a technical problem when one of the other three Marketing Support Representatives–MSR’s–was on her honeymoon, and the other was off having a baby. And the time I made it down into the limestone caves, in Boyers PA, where the US Civil Service Commission had its offices. You drove into the middle of a field where, if you didn’t know what you were looking for, there was nothing. But if you did know where you were going, there was a hole in the ground, and a slope downwards, which you followed in your car. At the gates, you were subject to a lengthy inquisition, and you had to sign your life away before they’d let you in, and when they did, they handed you a hard hat and a fire extinguisher, and the gates rolled back and you drove into a world where everything was sprayed that horrible institutional green paint. A cave world where doors had numbers on them and nothing else, so you had to know “which” door you were looking for. The other thing I remember was the toilets, which were run by vacuums. I don’t know where the output went. And I don’t want to.)
Oh, I have stories.
Nothing as quick as 72 hours (i.e., less than 1 month), but relatively fast.
I had a contracting job (with a potential permanent position) at a small (<30) company withing 2 hours from home. To beat the rush, I’d get to work by 7, leave about 4, and after eating dinner I would design and document creative ideas from 6 – 10 PM for free. My supervisor thought I was doing great, and then he went on a 2+ week vacation. Upon returning, he was on my case, and then the president and VP of Engineering resigned shortly thereafter.
In addition, the company subcontracted the transmitter to someone who didn’t understand the details of satellite radios. I gave my 2 week notice. The good news was that a local company rehired me for a permanent position.
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Mrs. She, I love to read clear, concise prose, perhaps because I’ve read so much obscure, wordy prose from students.
That’s one reason I read everything you write for Ricochet.
Keep ‘em coming.
The final four was in Albuquerque that year. I don’t remember the weather, but, as a cop, I had some. . .interesting interactions with out-of-state basketball fans.
Thanks @kentforrester, right back atcha! I read all your stuff too.
Fortunately, we didn’t make our move! My husband had decided he wanted to work with a company in MA; this is after we’d already lived in MA once and left for his job for CO. Anyway, he lived out in MA for a few months, stayed with my aunt and uncle (whom we adored) but suddenly discovered the friend he was going to work with was a crook! But he felt the plans had been made and was so much in shock that he figured we should still go back there from CO–NOT! I said that there was no point in leaving CO when (aside from my wonderful aunt and uncle), nothing pulled us back there. Once he recovered a little from this huge disappointment, he saw the sense in my reasoning. Not that we didn’t move again–back to CA, and now to FL! I’ve told my husband that I am NEVER moving again, so that’s that! Fortunately we like FL a lot. And he had other successful business ventures after the catastrophe in MA.
But yours sounds horrible! And yet, it’s funny how life directs us when we pay attention. Great post, @she.
Wow. What a circuitous route. Glad it all worked out. Thanks, @susanquinn
I’m on the “never move again” bandwagon too. The corollary to that, though, is that I have to do enough regular housework, regularly enough, to keep the place somewhat respectable, so that I don’t wake up some morning (as has happened before) and think, “urgh, this place is such a mess it would almost be easier to move than to clean.”
Working on it . . .
Sounds like you ended up on the winning end of that. I’ve had long commutes, and as long as the job at the other end of it was worth it and I was happy there, I didn’t mind. When there was a wholesale change of administration and management, and I didn’t like the new guys, the commute became a misery, and almost unbearable. I, too, was glad to move to an outfit closer to home.
It doesn’t sound dumb at all to me (well, that part about “not mentioning it to your wife,” might have been a bit rash). It really sounds as if you did your old company a favor; too bad they didn’t seem to recognize it and work with you rather than competing against you once they woke up to your good idea. Glad it worked out.
It would be hard to live a full life and not have made some really dumb decisions. Yours doesn’t sound very bad to me. I think if I were in your situation, I’d have left too. Your intended employer in Colorado was a flake, and you were probably wise to quit before you got sucked further into it. The only difference is that I wouldn’t have cried driving back to my previous home. It breaks my heart that the correct decision hurt you so much.
Thanks, @skyler. Sometimes it’s not so easy to see clearly when you’re up close, and I think that was most of what I was feeling. Sorry to have missed an opportunity I thought would be good for us all, and a move to such lovely country, stupid because I couldn’t make it work, angry at myself for not being able to make it work, angry at the company for being such jerks and for, essentially, forgetting all about me and treating me like a non-entity, when, after all, they were the ones that had offered me the job, etc. etc. and so forth. Once I got home, I sorted myself out in pretty short order (had to). And it was, indeed, in the long run the best decision, thanks for backing me up on that.
And yeah, full life. That’s probably not the most boneheaded mess I’ve ever made of things in my life, although it’s probably in the top three. The other two? Thereby hang some tales . . .