For My Next Trick

About 25 years ago, I became tired of sweating ALL. THE. TIME. The job in Chandler, AZ had dried up or was in the process of drying up and thoughts of moving were on my mind. I think it was on my mind more than Tracy's but so be it. We worked on updating my resume and looked online via Compuserve (remember that??) for any job that I might qualify for. I think I sent out 4 resumes. I got hits on two. One of the agencies told me that they were looking at me for a job at Motorola.

Motorola.

This was the company that I idolized during my college days. I used Apple Macs during my undergrad work and I did some programming on it. I fell in love with the processor. the 68k. It was so much easier to work with than the intel 8086 or later. Just a great piece of silicon. I had used the 6805 processor at my current work as well. It was just a great company. It was also ironic that I was surrounded by Motorola plants there in Phoenix, but the job was in Illinois. Didn't matter, I wanted out of Arizona.

I already had a trip ticketed to Chicago as we were traveling to Michigan to visit my parents. It just made sense to interview while I was there. So my parents travelled down to Chicago and I interviewed. I think it went well. I knew the chip. I was confident I could help the company. After the interview, my Dad wanted to get some Chicago pizza. I don't know what our thinking was, but we wound up stuck in downtown Elgin and while we were trying to get out of the traffic jam, I muttered, "If I do get the job, this is one place I won't live."

So eventually, we made our way back to Michigan. I think I received the offer soon after we arrived. I can't remember. I do know that Tracy and I went to Mackinaw Island and at one photo she shot, she told me to "Smile and say Motorola." I gave her about as good a smile as I ever gave.

So I came to work for Motorola, a company of about 175,000 employees. I was to debug a piece of equipment that had a particular bug for its entire life. In 3 months, after learning as much as I could about the operating system it used and going through the code, I found the bug. It was a memory leak. I got the job and was hired on as a Motorolan in April 1995.

I don't know how much I can show my gratitude for the opportunity to work for this company. While I worked, my wife received her master's degree at Northern Illinois University. Once she got her degree, Motorola put me through school for my Masters in Computer Engineering. My undergrad education was almost tailor-made for Motorola. My focus was on radio and my interests were on programming and computer design.  My masters was focused on what the company required of me at the time, programming and database work with transmission theory to keep me honest.

Then, after schooling, we built our family. Our first three children were adopted. We had built a home in all respects and Motorola provided financial support through repayment of our adoption fees. Those are not tiny, by the way.

Just like any experience, it wasn't without its ups and downs. I've sat in library parking lots in the middle of the night to fix issues when the library had the only internet connection within 30 miles. For almost 20 of these years, I couldn't take Monday's off. I've also been on-call most of these years. Redundancy has been sometimes lacking in my position. They even tracked me down in Guatemala when we were there adopting Madsen and Ellie. It has been interesting.

Having only worked for a start-up before Motorola, I don't know how much better or worse it would have been to work for another company of this size (we are now less than 20,000 I think). I can say that I have loved working here. I still enjoy my job, my coworkers, and the subject matter. It hasn't always been easy, but boy-howdy, I have really loved this job.

By the way, I hit 30,000 on the motorcycle this morning. I'm not proud of that number. The past years have been pretty busy during the summer and I really haven't gone much of anywhere since my eclipse trip in 2017. I really want to change that. In fact, I would have gone somewhere the past few days but, like so often, I'm on-call.

What the Heck Happened to Me?

When I went through my “faith crisis”, I had a lot to evaluate. In my journey down the rabbit hole of trying to find out what I had been a part of much of my life, I also spoke to a lot of other people that were going through the same thing. What better way to understand what I was experiencing than from people that had already made or were in the midst of the journey? I found a particular bent. They all seemed to be leaning left, politically. I was pretty conservative. However, with all my reading and listening to others, I hadn’t been listening to my conservative radio. My own life was much more interesting. Even then, I contemplated that the reason some of these left the church was due to them being liberal in such a conservative religion. No wonder they left. Cognitive Dissonance is a miserable thing to live with.

But, considering that I felt lied to most of my life about my most intimate beliefs, I wanted to know what else I might believe because of faulty information. I wanted to be ruled by evidence and not by desire. So I stopped listening to my right-wing radio. With listening to others and trying to make sense out of what was happening to me, I really felt empathy building. It was noticeable. I became much less of an island.

Holy Crap, I’m turning into a liberal! How the hell did that happen?

I guess empathy does that. I certainly didn’t "deserve" what happened to me. What about all those others that had things happen to them that they didn’t deserve?

I think I’m still conservative in some things. I still own guns, but I’m in favor of reasonable and realistic gun control. I think we should have a balanced budget, but I think our spending priorities are way out of whack.

Anyway, I am what I am. Sometimes I’m too much of it. Sometimes not enough.

I like listening to science and law programs. I realize now how skewed my old thinking is. I have a better understanding of how flawed our government is and some of those things really can’t be fixed. In other ways, our government is pretty good. I just wish we’d learn from other places, both good and bad. Our tendency for the concept of American Exceptionalism is overall damaging, just like religious exceptionalism blinds people to the suffering of others.

Oh well. I just wanted to say this.