American Dreaming – 1990’s / Part II

So, as stated earlier, I entered the private sector once again in this new decade. The 90’s were the last decade in the American Century, the last decade where the US could clearly claim any degree of dominance in most all aspects of life. In a lot of respects, I think the 1990’s became the last gasp of what the baby boomers thought of as the “American Dream.” By the end of this decade, the US politically started “taking it on the chin”, technologically they already were becoming subservient to Southeast Asia and Europe. The United States had become bloated and for the most part, they were a service oriented country that did little in the way of innovation while becoming the world’s largest consumers (literally and figuratively). The collision of these two worlds was inevitable.

For me, the decade was a coming of age, a rebirth in a lot of respects. I reinvented myself. I started a new chapter in my life. I probably achieved more in this decade than in any other in my life as far as advancing (hell creating) a career. I achieved this while gaining a greater understanding of myself and what areas to focus on in my life.

Leaving the familiar environs of my hometown, leaving a somewhat easy, cushy, position within the Civil Service and all the friends and support structure that I had (at that point in my life) was certainly a scary but exhilarating time for me. It also seemed to me that this really was one of those rare moments in life when I clearly saw the fork in the road and realized that despite the fact that the path I was choosing was fraught with the unknown, it was without a doubt the right path for me to pursue.

I threw myself into the job working 10 –12 hours days consistently and accepting an “on-call” posture in all of my off hours and weekends. In this manner, I was able to get through the first few years of being alone after the marriage went into the toilet. It was also this manner that I began a steady climb within all the companies that I became involved with in that time frame to take on every more prominent and more responsible positions in those organizations. I joined the ranks of management at the operating unit level, then management at a more regional role.

I relatively quickly began to adopt my new surroundings as “home” but it probably took the bulk of four or five years for that fully to sink in. The workaholic approach I was applying to my life assured me that I would have little time to focus on developing any life outside of work. At that point, this seemed to suit me just fine. The apartments I chose were small but, I maintained some vestige of a room for my son in each instance. I maintained a regular routine of traveling south on either Friday night or Saturday morning to pick him up and another trip of equal distance to return him on Sunday evenings. The trips themselves became something I most looked forward to over those years. It was during these times while we were both sequestered within our vehicle that we discussed all manner of topics. Things that were going on within his life, the projects he was involved with in school as well as topics around the news of the day. I think it was during those trips that we bonded more so than in most any other portion of our relationship together.

During this period of time I found that I had an affinity for computer networking. I was lucky enough to be given opportunities to take on design, implementation and management roles in local area networks and, in time, wide area networks in three different organizations in that decade. I enjoyed the work and learned a lot about the state of technology and in the matters involving management of technology (and people).

In my first interview of that decade, I encountered what had to be one of the weirder situations for a prospective job applicant to encounter.

---Jim