American Dreaming - 1990's / Part VI

Those first years in the 1990’s following the breakup and divorce were pretty rough. The divorce left me in pretty dire financial straits. I managed to rent out a very small apartment in a town near where I was working. It featured four rooms but I barely had enough furnishings to fill that space in those years. I left the marriage with a couch; one arm chair a rickety table and some dinner chairs. I slept on the couch for over six months before I was able to acquire a bed frame, box springs and mattress from another co-worker who was selling stuff from her brother’s estate.

I saw my son on weekends, which was the one bright spot in those years. I pretty much avoided the apartment for the first two years except to arrive there to sleep, shower and prepare for work the next day. I worked late pretty much every workday partly out of necessity but looking back on that period, I’m pretty sure a large part of that behavior was simply avoiding the scene of being alone in that apartment.

The work was very satisfying and there were large portions of my week where I completely forgot about my recent failures domestically and the guilt I felt becoming an absentee parent. The area and more specifically my apartment never seemed to become “home”. I always felt like I was only on an extended vacation or working trip and that I would return to the situation that had been my “home” for all of my adult life until this move.

Professionally, I thrived. I took on more responsibility willingly and learned all I could about the organization and the inner workings of the office politics. In relatively short order I was rewarded with a promotion into management. The operating unit that we formed became the crown jewel in our corporate make up. We were the most profitable operating unit and, as such, our numbers grew in the first year basically doubling the number of staff within our business unit in the first 18 months.

There was certainly some measure of socialization that I took part in during those first three years. It mostly was relegated to seeing other staff members in “after work drinking or eating scenarios.” I became close with a small group of other management folk that were called the CQA team. I was the “unofficial” fifth member of that four-person department for the first two years of the operating unit. Their (our) efforts were to find business processes and apply Dr. Deming continuous quality improvement concepts to them in an effort to gain efficiencies. I learned much about Six Sigma and other quality assurance methodologies in that time frame. More importantly, I found more ways to help the organization that was rapidly becoming my surrogate family for this rough period of my life.

---Jim