My Career in Computing

 I started my first salary job back in the nineties working for a company in Ann Arbor doing computer support and computer-aided drafting. A lot of my job was training the draftsmen that worked there how to use the CAD system. While doing that I started building and selling computers on the side, the draftsmen were some of my first customers. Then the recession hit, and I got laid off. I was still trying to sell computer hardware through my own business, and I was doing whatever work I could to pay the bills. I had been doing computer support work for a construction company in Ann Arbor, and the owner hired me to do some manual labor jobs to help get me through. 

I ended up landing a pretty good size customer for computer components, and my business started to really take off. Unfortunately, I didn't have the capital or the credit to keep up with the orders. One of my vendors suggested that I partner with a computer company in Ann Arbor that he was supplying. He made the introductions, and I traded my client for a sales manager job. My job turned into a general manager position pretty quickly. One of our big customers was Detroit Diesel, and I had been working with them on supplying hardware when the director of IT asked my boss if he could contract me to work onsite for thirty days or so to help with one of their projects. 

I really didn't want to take the position because I was worried my boss wouldn't be able to keep the company afloat. As it was, I had to spend a lot of time tracking him down at the local bar quite often when we needed things. He convinced me that this would be good for the business, and we negotiated a contract that I was happy with, and I started working in Detroit. 

The project I was working on was really exciting, and the thirty days went by without any talk of me ending my time there. I was really enjoying working with large enterprise systems plus I got to travel quite a bit. After a few months, my paychecks started bouncing, and my boss started ignoring my calls. My son had just been born, and my wife was constantly pissed off about money, so I quit working for the computer company, and I arranged to work for another contract house that was already doing business with Detroit Diesel. In my contract with them, I had it written out, that I owned the contract and could take it with me at any time and had them completely remove the non-compete clause. 

I received a letter a few weeks later from my now previous boss's attorney threatening to sue me which added another level of stress to my already strained marriage. I knew he had no case and that it was just a threat, but I couldn't convince my wife of that. The Ann Arbor business went under, and then my wife left me. I tried negotiating a rate increase with the new company because I was working over 60 hours a week, and I felt for anything over 40 hours, I should be paid the full rate. They replied to me with a letter in all caps explaining that it was costing them almost as much as I was making to keep me on staff and they were doing me a favor by keeping me on the payroll. At that point, I took over the contract as an independent consultant thus alleviating their burden. 

Throughout the next decade, I worked at Detroit Diesel, and I also had contracts with EDS, and a marketing company in Ann Arbor, as well as a number of other smaller clients. I would work in Detroit During the day and then come home and work on other projects in the evening while somehow finding time to be a single father. Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, I was really building some cool stuff. When I started at Detroit Diesel they didn't even have internet email. I built their email, SQL database, and web infrastructure, and I worked with the software team on building web applications. I loved my job and at this time I reported directly to the CIO, so I had a lot of control in setting the direction for the tech I was working on. 

Things sort of went downhill after Daimler Chrysler bought Detroit Diesel. The new CIO and I didn't work very well together. I had spent a decade building up an infrastructure I was really proud of, and his goals were to cut costs anywhere he could. When I went over my designs for an upgrade, he wanted to remove all the redundancies because they cost too much. To be honest, I was pretty arrogant at the time. I was a technologist and he was a bean counter, so I would get really frustrated when he didn't understand the tech. In May of 2005, he canceled my contract without any notice or explanation. 

I had just bought a restaurant at the beginning of the year with my family, so losing my main contract at this time was a horrible blow. My mom was supposed to be running the restaurant during the day while I worked, but by this time both my parents realized that running a family business was a lot of work and not much fun. My mom bailed out and left me stuck with a business that was losing money and not providing any income. My mom then spent five years bitching at me because she wanted her part of the investment back. My dad felt guilty for sticking me with everything and told me not to worry about the money and that he would try to help out any way he could. My mom never got that memo. 

I spent a year trying to make the restaurant profitable while blowing through all my savings trying to keep from losing my house and also trying to keep payroll checks from bouncing. Any time anyone from Detroit Diesel would contact me with questions, I always replied and tried to help in any way I could, and the following May they called me back because the infrastructure that I said was going to fail was failing. They gave me a temporary contract to fix the issues and helped me get a long-term contract with the off-highway division that was being split off from the main business as a separate entity. Because I still owned the restaurant, I negotiated a four-day-a-week deal, so I would have Fridays free for doing administrative tasks at the cafe. 

I continued working at MTU and owning the restaurant until December of 2010. In 2007 we were voted the best sandwich shop in southeast Michigan in the 4 the best competition from Channel 4. I really thought we were about to turn the corner and start making a profit, then the financial collapse hit, and things started sliding downhill. About thirty percent of our business was from catering, and that almost completely dried up. There was also a fire in one of the nearby buildings that ended up blocking the street for over a year which destroyed my morning business from EMU commuters. I fought to come up with new ideas to draw more business, but not being at the cafe during the day made it hard to manage. I kept throwing good money after bad, and by December 2010 we closed the doors. This was probably a good thing, I don't know if I would be alive today if we hadn't. For six years, I worked morning till closing, 7 days a week, 362 days a year. The level of exhaustion I went through is really hard to describe. 

I kept doing IT consulting throughout the years with the cafe and since its closing. Right now I only have one contract, but I have a couple of personal projects I am working on as well. I still have a dream/goal to start a software company that I could run while retiring. I would love to just work on my own products, but it's hard to find the time to do that and make money to pay the bills.