Christmas 2004
hristmastime is here once again. (Well, by the time you get this letter it may be more like New Years.) In any case, it’s been a few years since our last letter, so we have a bit of catching up to do. (You can find our new address and phone number at the bottom of the page.)
Getting from There to Here
2002 started innocently enough as life meandered along peacefully in Austin. We were getting the hang of being homeowners, making a few upgrades here and there. Brittany (then 4 years old) was in a “mother’s day out” program twice a week, and Alex was occupied with the task of developing his personality (then 2 years old). As for myself, I was enjoying my job as a contractor at IBM.
IBM Austin is a strange place. In a single stroll down the hall, you might first pass an engineer with a scraggly, chest-length beard, oversized t-shirt, baggy shorts, and sandals, followed promptly by another engineer wearing high-water pants, thick, black, ‘coke-bottle’ glasses, and a short-sleeve white shirt, complete with an over-stuffed pocket-protector. This kind of thing is not unusual at your average Austin high-tech company, but it’s not what most people think of when they hear ‘IBM’.
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. In July, my team lost about half of its funding, and since half of the team was made up of contractors, we were let go. (Contractors usually get paid more, but are used as ‘layoff cannon fodder’.) For the next 5 months, I joined the rest of Austin’s 12% unemployed, looking for jobs that weren’t there.
In October, I found a short-term contract working for Highland Homes, a Dallas-based homebuilder. As that came to a close, I found another contract with an IBM team in Dallas providing technical support to IBM business partners. What I didn’t expect was to walk into a real-life Dilbert comic strip. If you’ve seen the movie “Office Space”, you’ll get the picture. (If not, you should.) At the time, though, I was just happy to have a job.
The moment I knew I had the contract in Dallas, we put our house in Austin on the market and Janet started getting everything packed up and stored. In January, they came up to Dallas, and the four of us moved in with my parents to save on rent while buying/selling homes. Some have pointed out that if they tried this, the result would no doubt be some form of death or dismemberment, but my parents are pretty easy-going, and we all just tried to laugh whenever possible.
It took 6 months to get our house in Austin sold, and buy one here. It was also about this time that I really started to dread going to work in the morning, so when I got a call from Highland Homes (where I had contracted briefly the previous year) with a job opportunity, there wasn’t much to debate. Originally, the job was to write various software programs in the IT department for internal use, but a few months ago the company formed an Internet Marketing department, which took ownership of our three websites*, with me as webmaster. It’s a perfect mix of technical and business elements, and I’m really enjoying it. The benefits of working for a homebuilder have also been nice since we can get significant discounts on replacing or upgrading things like fences, carpets, windows, appliances, etc.
* horizonhomesdfw.com, highlandhomes.com, and huntingtoncustomhomes.com. Horizon, Highland, and Huntington are our three homebuilder brands, segmented by price and range of options/customization. The Horizon site is in good shape, and the other two are desperate need of the same, so don’t judge my skills by their current appearance!