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After Social Services
After I left Social Services, and old friend advised that I not immediately start looking for a new job. He suggested that I take 2 or 3 months to look around and think about what I really wanted to do with the rest of my life. I didn’t look for work, but I didn’t do much exploring, either. I spent most of the time in my 9th floor apartment at Riverview Towers (S. Washington) getting stoned. I was growing marijuana under fluorescent lights in 2 closets. I’d been a regular evening/ weekend smoker for several years, ever since it was introduced to me by co-workers at the Ingham County Department of Social Services.
When I did start looking for work, I had no success. No one seemed to be impressed that I’d saved the state $6 million. I was looking for work as a systems analyst and I had absolutely no training in that area. After a few months - when I saw my savings dwindling - desperation drove me to dump my marijuana down the incinerator chute - much to the dismay of my doper friends - and enroll at Lansing Community College. I took courses in Cobol programming and systems analysis.
In September 1978, soon after I started my second term at LCC, I got a job as a programmer/analyst in the City of Lansing’s data processing department - at a salary $10,000 less than I was making at Social Services. After 10 months, I found a better-paying job at Farm Bureau Services in Lansing. That lasted 9 months. I got fired for revealing my salary to co-workers. I took a parting shot in a letter to the Board of Directors.
It took 6 months to find another job, but this time it didn’t deplete my savings. Someone at the downtown YMCA, where I played racquetball, showed me an article in White Collar Management about an employee in a similar situation who’d complained to the National Labor Relations Board. Apparently the discussion of wages among employees is protected by federal law even if there is no union. I filed a complaint and the NLRB ordered Farm Bureau Services to pay me for all the time I was off. We settled for $7000.
An agency found me my next job. A company in New Orleans called Freeport Minerals needed someone to write a procedures manual for their data processing department. They moved me down and put me up in a hotel until I found an apartment. I stayed with them maybe 6 months, then took a job as a programmer/analyst with Gulf Systems Inc., a firm rumored to have connections with Governor Edwin Edwards. (In 2000, Edwards was convicted in federal court on seventeen counts of fraud and racketeering over a scheme to extort money from applicants for casino licenses.) I started out in the basement of New Orleans City Hall, where GSI had a contract to provide data processing services to the City. Later, I worked on state contracts at other locations in the city. One of my projects at the City was designing a maintenance control system for stop and yield signs. It was a simple batch system that replaced a paper system. It respected New Orleans tradition by allowing Sign Shop staff to describe a sign’s location at an intersection as uptown, downtown, river (Mississippi) or lake (Ponchartrain) as well as north, south, east or west.
While in New Orleans, I got married (No. 3) to Sandi Chilton, a New Orleans native I met at a Parents Without Partners meeting. I was technically a parent, even though my kids lived with their mother in Michigan. I moved in with Sandi and her teenage son and daughter. Soon I decided I’d made a mistake. I didn’t want to be stuck in New Orleans with most of my family in Michigan. Besides, Sandi acted crazy at times. (Later, a year or so into my 4th marriage back in Michigan, I decided Sandi was normal.) I left after 3 months, renting a car to do so because her son had rolled mine when I let him take it for a spin the day he got his driver’s license. I got the rental from one of those “Rent-a-Junker” outfits. It came with empty beer bottles on the floor. I hadn’t bought another car because it was being repaired by a friend of a guy who lived across the street from Sandi. It never did get repaired and I was out the $900 I’d given him.
Soon after I left Sandi, son Tom came to live with me. He hadn’t been happy living with his mother, her new husband and little sister Amy out in the country near Bangor, Michigan. He had just finished his junior year in high school. I’d heard that the public schools in New Orleans were lousy and the private schools were expensive, and since he was a smart kid, I investigated the possibility of skipping his senior year and going directly to college. He was accepted at the University of New Orleans.
In 1983, I worked on GSI’s bid proposal on a big project for the Louisiana Department of Social Services. It had the cute acronym “L’AMI”, which means “the friend” in French. We lost out to Electronic Data Systems (EDS), which at that time was headed by founder Ross Perot. I believed this project was the perfect fit for me, so I contacted EDS. It turned out that the contract required the Project Manager and the Lead Programmer to live in Baton Rouge. They had a Project Manager, but needed a Lead Programmer. My main qualification was “willing to live in Baton Rouge”.
Tom chose not to move to Baton Rouge with me, even though I told him I would not help him financially if he stayed. He moved into an apartment with a friend.
The L’AMI project was a big disappointment. Most of the EDS project team was based in Bethesda, Maryland, and after a few weeks on site gathering information, they returned home to do the work. I was left with very little to do. I spent a lot of time wandering around the gardens in front of the state capitol building.
After a few months, Amy arrived. Her mother had flown her down to me because she was putting a strain on her marriage. Amy was in her punk rocker period, and was pretty difficult. I bought her a used car, taught her to drive Baton Rouge streets, and let her run, but I insisted that she work part-time while going to high school.
Amy had her standards. She wouldn’t go into a K-Mart with me, and to avoid being seen in her uniform, she wore her winter coat in the Baton Rouge heat when she walked to her job at the nearby Taco Bell.
After a year, the contract for the L’AMI project was re-negotiated. It no longer required the Lead Programmer to live in Baton Rouge, and I was let go. EDS used me, then cast me aside. My old boss at GSI generously offered to take me back, but I decided to move back to Michigan. Part of the reason was that Amy was too much for me. I needed her mother to help out.
I decided to move to Grand Rapids, where I believed job opportunities would be best. We packed as much as we could into the 2 cars and drove to Michigan. After we found an apartment in Kentwood, I took a bus back to Baton Rouge, rented a truck, and hauled our furniture and the rest of our belongings back to Michigan. After 4 months, I got a job as a business analyst at Foremost Insurance. After 4 months there, I found another job for a little more money at a First of America Bank (now National City) service center in Portage. By that time, Amy had moved back with her mother, so it was just me and the 2 cats we’d adopted as kittens. That job lasted a little over 2 months. There was no system documentation and they didn’t support my efforts to write it. The office was dreary and it was spring. I quit.
It was a long, lonely summer in Portage - just me and the 2 cats. Money was running low and I couldn’t find a job. Finally, I accepted a job at a tiny software company back in Grand Rapids. I sold all the nice furniture I’d been hauling around with me since I left Lansing and moved to a furnished apartment in Grand Rapids. That job lasted maybe one day. They’d sat me down in a room by myself to learn the Basic programming language. I quit and went to work for Domino’s Pizza in Kentwood, where the only other employee my age had long nose hairs and lived in his car. The work was as fulfilling as anything I’ve had since Social Services, but the pay was low - even with tips - and I was still paying child support for Amy.
God intervened. I’d activated my name on state civil services registers when I returned to Michigan, and I got an invitation to interview for a job as a programmer/analyst for the Bureau of Retirement Systems in Lansing. I got the job. I gave the cats to my next-door neighbor in Grand Rapids and moved to a furnished apartment in northwest Lansing. I was 43 years old. I had no savings and no property other than a beat-up Volkswagon Rabbit, a Kaypro portable computer, and my personal belongings. I’d long since got a refund of my state retirement contributions, so I had no service credit that could some day count toward a pension. But I had a state job.
A visitor thought it amusing that I held on to my packing boxes.
I have been employed continuously since then. I’ve been married (No. 4) for 13 years and I own a house. Tom is in Kansas City, working for the Church of Scientology and delivering pizzas. Amy is in Boulder, Colorado, working for Intrado, a firm that maintains databases for 911 systems. She designs training programs.
Update: The above was written in 2003. I am now retired, still married, still living in Lansing. Tom got out of Scientology in 2006. He is delivering pizzas while studying to be a nurse. Amy now lives in Denver. She is still designing training programs, but for a different company. |
