Category: Reflections

When I was in junior high school (in some states, they call it ‘middle school’), I was in an awkward situation in one class because the teacher wanted me to sing to the rest of the class. 

Embarrassing Age
Junior high is an awkward age, mostly because people at that age transition through human maturity at different paces — such that you could feel like a dork if you’re not at the front line of becoming an adult. Most people at that age want non-attention — to allow you to ‘adult transition’ at your own pace.

One overlay is, if you do something embarrassing, you may never recover from the harassment/embarrassment you might receive from that event. The other overlay is — I had a good relationship with my teacher (despite being a dork, I am able to make friends), and she found out that I was familiar with the song she targeted to play to the class.

Tech Problems
We found ourselves in a situation where she was unable to play the song that she was intending to play. It was a CCR song (Creedence Clearwater Revival) and I’m pretty sure the song was Who’ll Stop the Rain. I grew up listening to CCR, so I knew the song.

This was mid-1970s, so technology was pretty minimal. All the students were sitting at attached rows of tables/desks — each with a slot to plug in a headphone. The teacher intended to play the song, and have the students listen to it — but she found herself unable to make it happen. It may have been that she didn’t know how to do it, or it may have been that something was technically broken at the music playing source. 

Singing Option
Either way, she realized that it was still possible to connect a microphone and have the students hear that — so this led to her idea of someone singing the song instead. It could have been her singing, but again — she was aware I knew the song, and wanted me to sing it.

Decision / Result
I considered the possibility of singing, but I declined. I did know the song, and was generally able to carry a tune — but again, it was an awkward/embarrassing age — so I wasn’t willing to do it.

Maybe if I did do it, and got good feedback from my classmates, it might have inspired me to follow a more-creative, musical career.

I guess I’ll never know…

The past few days, I seem to be in a better place mentally. For the past few years, when I wake up in the morning, my mind is extremely active. I’ve recently been talking to a therapist — plus two weeks ago, I talked to a psychiatrist who increased my medications. It honestly seems that the bump in medications has settled my mind a lot.

Normally, when I wake up, I have multiple trains of thought going on in my head — plus, I’m thinking about music, and have a song or two that I need to play on a speaker to get them out of my head. Recently, I find that I wake up and my mind seems fairly stable and clear. I’m actually able to think about what I need to do that day, plan it out, and get it done.

I’m almost to the point where I might not need to regularly talk to a therapist. I need to think that through. It happens to be the case that next week I have a conflict with my regular therapy appointment (a funeral) — so this might be the first step to meeting with the therapist less frequently.

I’ll figure it out.

I’ve had a good life, and I expect to live for a few more decades (my parents both lived into their 90s, with my mon still alive). I got a good job out of college, got moved to the (progressive) SF bay area, met a wonderful woman who became my wife, and had three children — all of which are doing great.

I’ve had an interesting and well-paying career, which I recently walked away from. I’m now to the point where I need to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. Some options:

• Work More — Since I’m not yet 65, I could conceptually work a few more years at a tech company. I’ve got good experience, and would end up with a well-paying position.
• Make Money, Other Options – I do other things that could make money — that don’t require me to be an employee of a company. Some modest things like: writing books, songs, etc. I also have a list of product ideas that could launch tech products/companies (which I could pass on to my children to drive). It’s interesting, I visited my mom recently (she’s in a nursing home) and told her that I had retired, and she said ‘You are smart. You should start a tech company and make lots of money. Your oldest brother should have been the one that created the personal computer.’ She’s not wrong, he’s also a smart guy…
• Enjoy – We have a good amount of money, and so could have fun traveling (even living) in other countries — for decades. Fun as this sounds, I do want to pass some money down to our children — so I don’t want to be too crazy about spending our money.

At the end of the day, I’ll do some combination of the options above — likely joining a tech company only if our spending flow is bigger than expected. One overlay is — I look young for my age. So, if we decided in 5 years that I need to get a job, I probably easily could — because they would think I’m younger than I really am.

Overall
I’m likely done with my career. I’m approaching 65, have recently walked away from a job, and am enjoying my unscheduled time.

I have worked in a tech role for nine companies — the first two companies not being ‘true’ tech companies (defense contractor, airline) but the last seven being tech. It’s interesting to document my departure from all these companies — because most of my departures were my decisions, but some were not.

MY Decision
Companies that were my decision to walk away from were: FMC Corporation, United Airlines, Octel Communications, Lucent Technologies, Charles Schwab, and Salesforce. Some of those departures were interesting:

• I left Schwab because — I was the best and most experienced project manager, but rather than promoting me to manage the project management group, they hired in someone else. A nice guy, but not as good a choice as me.
• I left Salesforce because it was an odd ‘tech’ company, and I was supporting a troublesome group. (Details here.)

The other companies — I just left because I had been there long enough, and it was time to move on.

THEIR Decision
Three companies that booted me out were: Cisco Systems, Marketlive, and Autodesk. In all cases, I ended up with a better job shortly afterward — and looking back, regretted not leaving these companies sooner. Here is the story of each of these companies.

• Cisco Systems – Cisco moved me and my family up from the south bay to the north bay. Big financial contribution from them. They had purchased an optical networking startup in Petaluma (at they time, the biggest tech purchase to date) and this company drove the overall tech progression to a faster data flow (optical is much faster than copper wires). Petaluma is a great town, and the schools were good – so it was great to have relocated me and my family. I worked as a project manager there for about 3 years. Eventually Cisco embraced the technology, but no longer needed the north bay location – so they started laying people off and shutting the location down. I was one of the first layoffs – but again, it was all good, and I ended up in a better place afterwards.
• Marketlive – A few years later (one company in between) I was working for a tech startup in Petaluma – one that was focused on e-commerce (web-based retail). I reported directly into the VP of engineering, as did the director of engineering. The director and I didn’t get along well. I did what she wanted (maybe not as fast as she hoped) but I also did other key project management things, plus I fulfilled requests from the engineers that reported into her (that she wasn’t doing). They would come directly to me to move things in the right direction. The director eventually complained to the VP about what I was/wasn’t doing— and he laid me off. Not a big deal, because I ended up with a better job at a better company.
• Autodesk – I was at Autodesk far too long (8+ years). It was good at the beginning, but got weird at the end. I ended up as part of a project management group that was being managed by someone who didn’t understand project management. I would meet with him weekly, and tell him that we weren’t meeting the needs of our stakeholders (and I would explain why) — and he would say ‘thanks Tom’, but wouldn’t make process changes. He would subsequently meet with a coworker of mine (who previously managed a writing team) and they would laugh and have a great time in a conference room. We eventually all got laid off — including the manager — so we clearly weren’t meeting the needs of our stakeholders. 🫤

Looking back, I’ve concluded that most times when the departure from a company wasn’t my decision — it was because I am a doofus and, though I was aware of the situation that led to my departure, I was too much of a dork to take the needed action to prevent it from happening — or at least make the departure happen when I wanted it to. In concept, informing the problem person’s manager about the situation could have moved things in the right direction.

Summary
As mentioned above, I stayed at some companies longer that I should have — but it all turned out well, and I always found a better job soon afterwards — even when the choice to leave wasn’t mine.

Family History
My parents didn’t go to college. I’m one of six siblings, and some of my older siblings went to college (some didn’t finish) and some others didn’t even go to college. My sister (four years older than me) got a nursing degree, and my next older brother got an engineering degree — which generally inspired me to do the same. My dad made OK money, but my parents didn’t have enough to fund my schooling — so I took out loans, graduated, got a job, and eventually paid my loans off.

School Choice
I studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. I have a math head and a problem-solving engineering head — so I could have focused on math (probably wouldn’t have gotten me a good job) or mechanical engineering (my mind thought I already had enough mechanical engineering skills) — so I instead went with electrical engineering. University of Illinois was a public university in the state that my family just moved to — and so, was generally affordable (because it was public) — but I didn’t fully appreciate that it also had a good reputation for producing solid engineers.

Class Load Limitations
To ensure that engineering students took the right classes to feed their engineering degrees, the school was very specific about what classes those students should/shouldn’t take. The required classes were all science, engineering, math, software programming, etc — and there was no option to take classes for language, history, sports, etc UNLESS you took a larger class load, and squeezed these extra classes in. Doofus me did exactly that. 😐

How Dumb Was I?
If I were sensible, I would have taken the recommended class load, learned what was needed to become an engineer, and moved on — but apparently I’m not sensible. I took a large class load each semester, often needing approval from the dean to allow me to take that many classes. I probably took 40% more classes than I needed to — including language classes, random things (like bowling), high-level math classes, etc. I even took additional classes outside the college — like American Sign Language, and Esperanto. A good indication of how ‘dumb’ I really was, is — at the end of four years, I was missing one class needed to get my degree — so I had to attend one additional semester (which allowed me to take even more classes 🫤).

Graduation Timing
Because I finished mid-school-year, I didn’t benefit from the university process to help students land jobs at the end of the school year. (Granted, this process was a little bit thinner decades ago.) 

Job Applications
When I graduated, I went back to live with my parents, and my mom helped me submit written/paper applications to various companies. I still have a notebook listing 100+ companies that I applied to. 

One company I applied to was a location in Minnesota (same company my dad worked for in West Virginia and Illinois), and that same company reached out to me from a different location (San Jose, California). I did an on-site interview in San Jose, and got a job offer which I accepted. Seems crazy that I could have ended up in Minnesota and had a very different life.

GPA
One overlay is that my university used a five-point scale for GPA’s — which means straight A’s would get you a 5.0 GPA. I took too many classes in school and ended up with a GPA below (but close to) a B. (Most schools use 4.0 for A’s — so my B-ish GPA may have looked like an A-ish GPA.) I may be overthinking it, but I suspect that the company that hired me may have thought my GPA was better than it really was. I’m a tech-smart guy and a solid worker, so the company wasn’t disappointed with me when I worked for them.

Overall
In summary: I took way too many classes in college (plus extra external classes), didn’t graduate on time, had an impacted GPA — but ended up with a good initial job that fed my successful multi-decade tech career — and got me to California where I met and married an amazing woman who has made my life wonderful.

I recently retired (maybe…). It’s either an early retirement, or a few months off before I look for a new ‘couple year’ job. I’m not yet 65, but I walked away from my job because it was problematic — and I needed a break. Below are the factors that led me to quit.

COMPANY
I was working for Salesforce — a well-known ‘tech company’ that really was very different from typical tech companies. A typical tech company (Salesforce is the ninth tech company I’ve worked for) has a high percentage of tech workers (engineers, etc) and focuses on developing products. Neither of these are true of Salesforce. 

Tech Workers
Less than 10% of Salesforce employees are tech workers (engineering) — crazy. This means that most directional decisions for the company (and contributing groups) are made by non-tech employees. It could be that the existing Salesforce products are 100% complete/solid, and that the only existing effort needed today is selling/supporting these products. If this were really the case, then Salesforce has 10 times the number of employees it needs.

Process
The other weirdness about Salesforce is the focus on ‘how’ to do things. Every year, every employee has to produce a very detailed document on what they will do that year. This document is reviewed/approved by the employee’s manager, and made available to those that the employee works with.

Plus, the employees need to take a dozen online classes — essentially the same ones every year. Also requiring scores of hours of time. Classes like: how to talk about Salesforce, etc.

Further, there are recurring presentations (every other month ish) from each group, on the details of what they are planning to accomplish over the next handful of months, and their confidence on success.

Overall, I probably spent 20%? 25%? of my time on process, rather than just turning the crank and getting things done.

ROLE
I worked at Salesforce for a little more than 6 years — in 4 or 5 different roles. Some were great, some not. Without going into the contrast between all my roles, the one that inspired me to part ways with the company was my last role, which I’ll summarize below.

My job role for the past few decades across multiple tech companies has been project/program manager — which means that I own getting things done (e.g., producing products). I’ve been very successful in this role across many companies, including all of my previous roles at Salesforce.

To accomplish my job, I need to communicate and enforce the needed development processes. In my last role at Salesforce, the group managers that I was supporting wouldn’t follow the processes I needed from them. Some examples:

• Coordination – To stay connected and aligned on what needs to get done, I normally run a weekly meeting with the group managers where we share progress and agree on what needs to happen over the next week. The managers of the org I was supporting told me that they didn’t want to meet weekly. Also, some managers ducked out of the infrequent coordination meeting midway through, or didn’t even attend — making it even more difficult to stay aligned.
• Tracking – I created a list of active items, and updated progress status daily. Ideally, the group managers should frequently look at this list, add/remove items as needed, update status, etc. They rarely looked at the list — pretty much only at the infrequent coordination meetings.

I was working 50-60 hours a week trying to make things happen but, because the management I was supporting wasn’t doing needed actions — we weren’t necessarily focused on the right things, and weren’t accurately tracking progress.

This all came to a head when one of the VPs I was supporting complained to my management that I wasn’t doing a good job. Rather than connecting with me on the ‘real’ situation, my management believed the VP, and created a detailed list of ‘improvement’ items I needed to do. I started chipping away at the list, but it was unnecessary items that were taking even more of my time.

MY HEAD
The other overlay was — I was very stressed (and depressed — even though I didn’t know this at the time). I was working long hours, crabby to my wife, and still getting beaten up by the work groups I was supporting.

My wife and I were regularly chatting with a couples counselor — who suggested that I may be ‘on the spectrum’ (be autistic). I read about being ‘on the spectrum’ and honestly thought that this could be true of me. I was subsequently tested for autism and ADHD — and they concluded that neither of these were true of me (those with these conditions are not broadly functional, like I am) — BUT, they concluded that I was depressed, and would benefit from anti-depression medication. I’m now taking this medication, and feel a lot better.

DEPARTURE
My long hours and distress, plus other companies regularly reaching out to me to work for them, led me to quit my job at Salesforce. It wasn’t worth the unhappiness. (It’s interesting that the person in my same role with this same group quit the company a year ago — likely for the same reasons.) I did put together very structured guidance on what went wrong, and how to (potentially) make the right things happen — for the next person taking over my role.

I’ve now been away for two months, have gotten past much of my depression, and am generally in a better place. I still need a bit more recovery, but things are definitely better than they were when I was working.

Maybe I’ll stay retired. Maybe I’ll find a job in a few months with a more-sensible tech company.

I’ll figure it out.

I’ve worked in tech all my career. Because I started decades ago, it’s interesting to read about some of the jobs that I had – because some were intro/early work for (at the time) cutting-edge technologies, that are quite commonplace today. Below are some examples:

Utilizing Microprocessors
My first job out of college was for the defense division of FMC Corporation (San Jose, CA) – that built armored personnel carriers (low-end tanks). I had a degree in electrical engineering, and was part of an effort to rip out electrical circuitry from these vehicles and replace the circuitry with microprocessors running software. The benefit of using software/microprocessors was enabling easy future functionality enhancements (through software upgrades) rather than requiring updating circuitry.

Because it was a defense contractor, we had to learn/use a defense-approved software language (Ada) – so I had to take a class at a local junior college. The project was successful, but it’s interesting to think that I was part of the early utilization of software on microprocessors.

Distributed Processing
At the same company above, I had to crunch on a lot of data to get needed results (on a later project). In that era (mid 1980s) there weren’t online server farms to give you the complex results you might need. So what I did was: worked evenings, broke my data up into small chunks, loaded it onto different employees’ work computers, had these computers crunch the data, then collected and compiled the results.

This gave me the results I needed, but it’s interesting to note that – at the time – work computers didn’t have usernames and passwords. So I was able to access 10-20 work computers (of other people) to crunch, and obtain, the results that I needed. Distributed processing wasn’t a technology that I fed / helped develop, but utilizing a bunch of coworkers’ computers is an interesting side story.

In-Seat Video
My next job was for United Airlines (south of SF). I was still an electrical engineer and worked for the Interiors group – so I had responsibility for anything electrical within the airplane cabin. United was innovative at the time (early 1990s) so I was involved with two interesting projects:

1. Helping define the Boeing 777. United was the first 777 purchaser, so we had input into the cabin content and configuration. (Side note – I remember being on a 777 test flight, and buzzing the Grand Canyon.)
2. Driving ‘in-seat video’ – dedicated screens embedded in the back of the airplane seat in front of each passenger (a new innovative concept). Lots of visits to Boeing (and Microsoft), plus lots of visits to a contractor in England who was helping with the video screens.

It’s interesting to me that, today, seatback video screens on airplanes are common – but I was a big contributor to the initial development / deployment of those screens.

The other interesting thing about my job at United is that – because my job was more providing direction than doing hands-on engineering – I transitioned from being an engineer to being (sort of) an architect, then to being a project manager.

Voicemail
Back in the day, if you wanted to have a recorded message from a missed telephone caller, you needed an at-home device – essentially a cassette tape recorder connected to your home phone – to capture that message. In the late 1990s, I worked for a company, Octel (SF south bay) – a ‘voicemail startup’ that built racks of equipment for telecommunication companies to provide voicemail service to customers. This allowed people to not need at-home devices, and this technology also fed recorded messages for mobile phones – which were then becoming a common product.

To me, it’s interesting (almost embarrassing) to say that I worked for a startup that provided voicemail – because voicemail is such an everyday thing today. 

Lucent bought our company, but was more interested in the voicemail product and worldwide support offices than in the employees. I originally hired into Octel as a project manager but, with lots of people leaving week by week after the Lucent purchase, I ended up becoming a team manager for two teams at the same time. Also interesting – I had lots of Octel stock (mostly vested) which could have been worth >$100K (a lot at that time), but I ended up pocketing less than $400 when I left the company.

Optical Networking
My next job was with an optical networking company. At that time, data networking was done through copper cables – which had a low limit on data capacity and speed. Cisco (south SF bay)  bought an optical networking startup (fiber optic cables) in the north SF bay area (Petaluma) – which was at the time the highest-priced tech acquisition to date.

As you can imagine, throwing lots of money at a startup in the modest north SF bay area gave the founders a ton of money in their pockets. One of the founders bought a major portion of the Lake Sonoma shoreline. Another bought businesses in Petaluma, including the Phoenix Theater – a music venue. Another quit working, traveled the world, and blogged about his adventures (blogging was new at the time). To show off (I guess) some employees had expensive cars (Ferrari’s, etc) delivered in the company parking lot. Unfortunately, I hired in post-acquisition (and didn’t pocket gobs of money) – though Cisco did pay to move my family from San Jose to Petaluma.

I helped refine and support the company’s optical networking devices. It was a good job, in a good town – and optical networking significantly advanced data flow on multiple fronts.

Ecommerce
A few years later, I sought and took a local job at an ecommerce startup in Petaluma. Petaluma is small enough that I had a short commute, and even bicycled to work (after acquiring a good bicycle).

[One side story is that – at the optical networking company mentioned above – they had a ‘bike to work’ day. I was close enough to do this, but didn’t have a bike (my old-ish bike was still in storage). So I rollerbladed to work – down the shoulder of a busy-ish road, past Lagunitas Brewery. This required me to carry shoes, and rollerblade back. Funny story.]

Anyway – the local e-commerce company was interesting, but it wasn’t really going anywhere. Plus, I found myself butting heads with the director of engineering – who wasn’t doing the right thing to move things forward successfully. I eventually got laid off – because I was pushing for the right path, which wasn’t in line with what the engineering director wanted. No big deal, but what is sad is that some people (including the dad of my son’s good friend) stayed with the company, but didn’t pocket any meaningful money after the startup acquisition. This startup took more than a decade to get acquired – which is a long time. I didn’t pay money out of pocket to keep my ‘startup stock’ – which was the right decision – because it didn’t provide any meaningful monetary benefit.

Cloud Computing
I then worked for a CAD company (Autodesk –  San Rafael, then SF) – and one of the efforts I drove was to move the ‘crunching’ (CAD rendering) from local computers to the cloud (such as Amazon). The concept was – don’t require users to have powerful computers (instead, crunch it in the cloud). Not a crazy concept, but it made sense – and was innovative at the time. So, part of what I did was to ensure our rendering functionality worked in the cloud. It all went well, but it was a big effort. This was the early 2000s, so cloud computing was kind of new.

Again, it was interesting to be part of the move from local computing to cloud computing – especially at an acknowledged CAD company.

Summary
So, at the end of the day, I find it interesting that I –

• Moved across ‘cutting-edge’ (at the time) tech companies, over the years
• It didn’t occur to me to instead launch/join my own happening startup, to make money enabling/building young ‘that era’ technology

I’ve made good money, but it possibly could have been better. Oh well, life is what it is…

SAINT ALBANS
I grew up in a house in West Virginia in a modest neighborhood. The town I lived in, St Albans, was small – about 10,000 people. There were some fancier neighborhoods in town (my brother, at one point, rented a three-story house in town with his first wife, her brother, and the brother’s wife), but our family neighborhood was smallish houses – mostly one story – near the train tracks.

St Albans sits at the junction of the Coal and Kanawha rivers, and is surrounded by tree-covered hills. Someone that I had a connection with as a child drowned in the Coal river – I’m pretty sure it was a classmate (Willie Hillon?), but it might have been the brother of a classmate. (I just searched online, and Coal River drownings seem common.) Despite having only 10,000 people, St Albans is one of the bigger cities in West Virginia – it is 12th in population in the state, with no city in WV (not even the state capital) having more than 50,000 people.

As the river name suggests, the coal industry is big in West Virginia. I remember seeing coal trains going down the train tracks on the far side of the field behind my house. I also remember hanging around the train tracks – including leaving coins on the tracks to get flattened by the passing trains.

West Virginia is a modest state, and St Albans is a modest town. I remember as a child when Kmart opened in town, and it was a big deal – because we didn’t yet have any real department stores. St Albans has a downtown, but it’s only a couple blocks long, with nothing very exciting.

DREW STREET
But back to my house –

What’s interesting about our house in St Albans was that it was arguably one of the fancier houses on the street – because it had a lot of living space. The people before us had converted the garage into living space, plus added a connecting room between the original house and the converted garage. Our overall square footage was almost double that of nearby houses – which was good, because we were a family of eight. (Having said that, there were other families in town with more kids – 10, 12, 14 – to the point where each of my siblings would have a child from one of these families in their grade at school.)

The converted garage in my childhood house was made into: a laundry room, office area, plus a master bedroom with a bathroom and walk-in closet. The wall that was the garage door was redone to a standard wall, and the overall heating was provided by a wall-mounted radiant heater. It all worked well. The converted garage was big enough to have a pool table, plus a ping-pong table that we would set on top of the pool table. Early on, some of my brothers slept in the converted garage – but when my older siblings moved out, it became my parents’ bedroom.

It was the added connecting room between the original house and garage that was the ‘hub’ of our family interactions – it was our ‘family room’, but we called it the ‘breezeway’. Why? Because it had louvered windows on both ends which allowed good airflow. Each window had 5? 6? horizontal shelves top to bottom, and my mom kept plants on those shelves. The breezeway alone was maybe 150-200 square feet. It had a door on each of the four walls – house, garage, side yard, and patio. My parents added a floor-to-ceiling bookcase on one wall (which also housed an aquarium). This room also had a table made from a telephone cable spool (which my parents made into a usable play/activity table). We spent a lot of time in the breezeway.

One interesting aspect of having more siblings than bedrooms is – I never had my own bedroom growing up – though my sister always did (only girl). When we moved to Chicago, I probably had my own bedroom (don’t exactly remember) – since it was only me, my parents, and my younger brother. I definitely did have my own bedroom starting junior year of college – after we moved to a four-bedroom apartment. And, once I moved to California after college, I had my own bedroom – until I got married 😊. But it is one of those things that you don’t really think about – regardless of which side of the line you are on. If you share a bedroom, that’s what you do. If you have your own, you don’t think about what life would be like if you had to share.

NEIGHBORHOOD
Behind my house was an alley – an unpaved road of pebbles, sand, and dirt. Every so often, the city would have a truck drive down the alley to lay down oil to keep the surface intact. There were a couple of houses on the alley, but I’m not sure what their official addresses were. One of the houses a few hundred feet down the alley had a fat beagle named Ginger that used to wander over and visit us. Once she knocked my younger brother over when he was a toddler. The alley was rough on the feet, and the soles of our feet got quite tough from walking/running on the alley. There was also a truck that would annually spray a cloud of pesticide the length of the alley. Probably not healthy for us, but we didn’t really avoid it when it passed.

Mr Perry’s house was behind us on the alley. I remember one day, someone had written the word ‘shit’ on his garbage bin. I was young at the time, and didn’t know that word. I asked my siblings what the word was, and they said (to keep me naive) that they didn’t know.

Beyond the alley was a field, and beyond the field was a railroad track with slow-moving coal trains of 100+ train cars. We could see the trains from our back windows and backyard. The track was probably 500 feet away, so the noise didn’t disturb us or keep us awake at night.

Our house was also close to our church and associated elementary school – one block away. This made it easy to walk to school and church. St Albans was small enough that later I was also able to walk to/from the junior high and high school.

OVERALL
Looking back, I recognize that the house I grew up in was modest – but it worked well for us (my current SF bay area house is worth ten times more than my childhood house, per real estate websites 🫤). My childhood house was big enough, and it had a convenient location. We all walked to and from school and church – including my grandmother who lived with us for a time, and was able to spend as much time at church as she wanted. I went to college in Illinois, and have spent my career in California. I don’t miss my childhood house, or St Albans – though I do have fond memories of my childhood with my family.

I broke my leg in college. How? Why? It’s an interesting story. First, some context:

TAME IN HIGH SCHOOL
I didn’t party in high school. There were three factors:

• NERD – I was a nerd (and therefore hung out with other behaved, nerdy students).
• MOVED – My family moved to a new state in the middle of my high school years, so this interrupted whatever social inertia I had in motion.
• DISTANT – In my last couple of years of high school (in Illinois), we lived far away from the high school (it was in the next town) – so I had to bus to/from school and therefore I didn’t hang at school outside school hours, and didn’t socialize with other students.

So when I went away to college, I was ripe for having fun.

WILD IN COLLEGE
To make things extra bad, the university I went to (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) was very much a party place. There were multiple factors:

• DRUNK FRESHMEN – Even though the drinking age in Illinois was 21, the dozen bars on the edge of the campus would let you in if you were 18 (Champaign) or 19 (Urbana), and would serve you alcohol once you were inside. So the effective ‘bar drinking age’ at college was 18. (I’m confident/hopeful that this has tightened up since I went to school.)
• COMPETITION – These bars wanted your business, and so would have promotions and events to draw you in. One bar had a football event called ‘quart per quarter’ where, if you drank eight pints (a gallon) of beer in three hours (the duration of a football game), you got a t-shirt. (I got one.)
• GREEK SYSTEM – UIUC had the biggest fraternity/sorority system in the country. There were parties every week and, if you had connections, it was easy to know about and attend these parties. I lived in a dorm for two years, then an apartment – but still went to frat parties.

So it was common to drink (a lot) on weekends – plus late, some weekday evenings.

THE INCIDENT
So one drunkish weekend evening, I was wandering about on campus with one of my apartment roommates, John. There was a big building mid-campus called the Armory, which was shaped like a quonset hut (like a barrel on its side, cut in half horizontally). We always spent a lot of time at the Armory: it had a firing range, and an indoor track surrounding a playing field – where we used to play a lot of ultimate frisbee on weekend mornings, mostly to sweat and get past our hangovers. (For those of you in milder climates – indoor tracks and athletic fields are not uncommon.)

That evening, John and I decided to climb over the roof of the Armory – which is about 100 feet at its peak. Why did we do this? – who knows. To climb the roof, we had to wander up a floor or two (and climb out a window) – to where the curved roof began.

Climbing the curved roof was challenging, but doable. The roof was made of panels maybe eight feet tall. So we had to lift one of us to grab the top edge of the current panel, and then pull the other one up. The frame of each panel was sturdy and deep – so there was no worry with standing on that frame and progressing to the next.

We did a great job. We got to the top, then started descending down the other side. We were maybe 80% of the way through the climb (up, then down) – but then it started to rain. The rain was light, so it wasn’t obviously a concern – BUT, it did cause me to slip on the very last panel, catch my left foot in a rain gutter, and fall over – hanging from my left foot. Snap! John helped me get disengaged. But there I was – sitting on the flat roof in the rain, with a broken leg (both bones in my left calf).

Optimistic John tried to tell me that I was OK and should get up – but that wasn’t possible. He then left me, got the fire department, and they got me down with a big mechanical firetruck arm, and took me to the hospital.

TREATMENT
I remember being in the hospital (still slightly drunk?) and the doctor inserting a pin through my knee down the center of my shinbone to line the bone up to heal. I’m sure I was given anesthesia, but I remember him pounding the pin into my shinbone, and my whole body bouncing around on the table with each hammer blow.

I spent a week in the hospital (different era – no rush to boot you out). My sister came to visit me there – likely my parents, too. I got a visit from a policeman while in the hospital (because I was trespassing?) – but when he saw me lying there with my broken leg, his perspective was ‘well, you’ve suffered enough’. No penalty.

RECOVERY
I got sent home to my parent’s house for a couple weeks with splints on the sides of my leg, and the leg wrapped up. I guess this was to ensure the skin was healing well before they put on a cast. I think the shinbone poked through the skin where it broke, plus there was the knee entry point for the pin.

I ended up back down at school, with a cast on my leg for a couple months, and had to crutch to and from class. When I got my cast off, my leg was so skinny (like an arm) – but it didn’t take long for it to recover, and build muscle.

REFLECTION
Looking back, I was fortunate that I didn’t slip on a higher roof panel and fall farther – and also that my bone breaks were clean (midway between the knee and foot) so there was no joint damage, and the bones healed well. No lasting muscle damage.

The doctor who put my leg back together did a great job. As an adult, I’ve been able to run, hike, bicycle, play tennis, etc with zero impact from my broken leg. Surprising, but good. I have a lump in my shin where the bone healed, but no lasting after-effects. I still have the pin that held my shin together – it’s metal, a little more than a foot long, and as big around as a pencil. I also have a sizable scar on my knee from pin insertion/removal.

SADNESS
My former roommate John died recently. I didn’t stay connected with him post college, so I don’t know the full story. He was athletic (in college, we used to run ten miles every other day with another roommate), plus he was a year younger than me. He was a good guy – I’m sad for him (and his friends and family).