National Cash Register was looking for a few enterprising souls to join them on the ground level of a project called "The Windows NT Global Support Center."  After a quick interview I was in on a four month contract.   I was told that there was a chance that I would be hired on as permanent staff at NCR following the end of the contract.

After four months Steve Babish dragged me into his office for a meeting and made me a job offer.  I didn't take long in answering 'yes.'  He was offering me the stability of a real office like I'd had at DuPont and with a smile on his face and a hearty handshake, he seemed to treat me like family.  Plus he'd offered me a salary which was at least eleven-thousand dollars a year more than what I was making at CCG.  I'd have been a fool not to accept!

I was having the time of my life from the moment I started there.  Phone support appeared to be my *thing.*  I took quickly to the NT operating system and learned all I could about networking and the internet.  My happiest moment came when NCR (AT&T at the time) flew me out to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond/Bellevue for a class on the second beta of a new product they were calling Systems Management Server (SMS).  I loved Seattle and thought I'd died and gone to heaven when I found the Kinokuniya Bookstore above the Uwajimaya in Chinatown and stumbled across their Manga section.

The party came to an end on September 21, 1995.  One layoff had been bad enough, but this second one really got to me.  It was three days after my birthday and the same day I got a positive annual work review AND a raise.  AT&T transplant (and rumored closer) Gary Hewson notified me that I was no longer employed at AT&T GIS (what NCR became at the beginning of '95).  GIS was restructuring (a new term for downsizing), and people were getting laid off left and right.  A total of 400 people at my site lost their jobs in a fit of fiscal carnage.

After that came four of the worst months I've ever had.  Unemployment isn't exactly a morale-booster, after all.  I had sworn early on that I'd never be a contractor again so I was left to my own devices concerning the job hunt.  Christmas went by like it had never happened, and except for a week spent at my friend Bert's place in Canada, life was perpetually annoying.

In late January 1996 I finally found a position listed in The State newspaper for a job at Newberry College.  I responded to the ad which was originally listed as a position that dealt mainly with Web Services.  My experience was such that I meshed perfectly with their program.  They had a Windows NT network, so I didn't have to learn anything odd or different.  I was able to jump right in as the Network Administrator and made a difference immediately.  Right off the bat I met a lot of wonderful people (Hi Renee, Jo, Jan, Barbara, Ann, Dave, Otis, Clint, and Rupert!) at the college as a result of my experiences over the years.  I've made friendships that are enduring and hope to continue to do so far into the future.

About a year after I joined the hallowed halls of the 'Berry, something happened to me that changed my life completely.  Sandi Hayden, someone I loved with all of my heart, was killed in a car accident in August of 1997. (The link will take you to a page about her and what happened to her.)  It hit me completely out of the blue and wound up hurting me far more deeply than I could have ever thought possible.  Her death continues to haunt me, and it took me a long time before I ever got over it.

Time may heal wounds, but it's no good at lessening sorrow in the face of tragedy.  Sandi's death sent me spiraling into a seriously deep depression.  When you lose someone that you love with all of your heart, it can't help but affect you to the core.  When you consider the manner in which she died, it makes you stop and rethink your whole life.

It would be a couple of years before I came out of my shell and started living again.  Work managed to keep me busy throughout that ordeal and probably saved me from complete insanity during the immediate days after the funeral.  In fact, I worked so hard to forget my pain that I wound up throwing myself completely into my job and neglected almost every other facet of life. That decision would have damaging repercussions for me a couple of years down the road.

Since becoming the network administrator I had helped the college's fledgling network grow from three servers to twenty three.   Also their ethernet has been expanded from one building to twelve, with more wiring still to go in some buildings (and more fiber to run between the buildings).  I should know!  I was one of the *two* people who ran the majority of the cable! [and terminated it, and toned it out, and set up the clients, etc.]

There is one other thing that I got roped into doing while I was at the 'Berry that merits mentioning.  Twice in my 4.5 year stint at the school I wound up teaching courses for the Computer Science department.  Yes, yours truly was a college professor twice before the age of 31.  But that interesting footnote to my college career also spelled the end of my time at Newberry College.

Private colleges are notoriously underfunded.  That's almost a universal constant, unless you happen to be Duke University, Harvard, etc.   That being the case Newberry College had never been able to come close to the salary that I had been making while I was at NCR.  Even though I loved working at the college and savored all of the successes that I had achieved, I quite literally could no longer afford to work there.

The low pay, the hundred mile-a-day drive and the excessive work and hours that I had to endure just to keep running in place was taking its toll on me.  It all came to a head in February, 2000 just as I was really getting into teaching my second semester (CSC 410).  I woke up one morning and noticed a swollen area had appeared on the back of my leg right at my butt.  I'd felt crappy throughout day and attributed the redness of the skin to a rash caused by stress and exhaustion and probably something in the air.

An ice storm that night wound up keeping the school closed for three days.    I'd spent the entire time at home bedridden and feeling worse as the swelling slowly grew.  Big baka idiot that I was, I refrained from getting to a doctor (even after the ice had melted and it was safe enough to drive around town) because I'd assumed that the swelling was going to get better sometime soon.  Well, the day that the roads cleared up enough to get back to Newberry I returned to work.  I was feeling so bad by the time I arrived that I wound up going back home after only staying at my desk for thirty minutes.

So once I literally got my ass to the doctor (which was a mess because I was now bleeding from the wound) I found out that I'd been hosting a really nasty staph infection.  The doc told me after draining and packing the wound that I could've died if I'd waited much longer to come in.  My white blood cell count was double the normal level and the infection had spread quite a bit under my skin.  I was in pain and I was also scared out of my mind.  The more I'd thought about this the more haunted I felt.  After all I had been told that I almost died.

They also told me that I was a Type II Diabetic.  That had been discovered when they had run my white blood cell count. I was told that my diabetes had probably been around for a good while, and it had helped the infection to fester and intensify.  Also, my general practitioner had said that my weight combined with all of that work related stress had caused the onset of my Diabetes.  So I made a decision that day that once the semester was over I had to either get one hell of a raise or find another job that didn't run me through the wringer.

As I'd said before private colleges don't pay very well, so at the end of May 2000 I wound up saying goodbye to Newberry College.  I'd found a couple of job opportunities a month before and interviewed for each of them.  One was with McKendree College outside of St. Louis in a sleepy town known as Lebanon, IL.  Another was with a local website development firm, Renaissance Interactive.

After a pair of wonderful interviews I was in the unique situation of having to choose between two perfect jobs.  Bob McKinnon and Dr. Carlos Mora fought very hard to convince me that moving to the Midwest would be good for both myself and their college.  I should mention that the main reason that I even entertained the idea of working there was due to the fact that Bob McKinnon and I had worked together before at Newberry College, although he had left after my second year at NC to go to work at McKendree.  It was due to his recruiting efforts that I drove up to St. Louis for the interview. 

During all of the recruiting efforts from the Midwest, Tammy O'Berry fought like a prizefighter to get me to stay in the midlands of South Carolina and work at a job that was actually 27 miles closer to my home than Newberry College was.  Offers and counter offers were made, and I spent the better part of five days debating, pondering and considering.  After all the soul searching it was with deep regret that I had to phone Dr. Mora and tell him that I was turning down his offer.  There were too many reasons to stay local, not the least of which being concerns about my grandfather's health.  RI had made a comparable pay offering to what McKendree had a few days earlier in my interview with them.  The fact that I didn't have to deal with the hassles of a complete relocation also played a role in my decision.

So there I was, working for one of the top ten web design firms in the nation.   There were a bunch of really cool people at Renaissance Interactive, and almost all of my co-workers were my PEERS, which had never happened to me at any of my previous jobs.  I had hoped that this gig would've lasted a good long time, but despite a whole bunch of hope and crossed fingers, the wheel turned once again.

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