This is a long post because I need to document the circumstances that have put me where I am today...
March 1st, 2008 began one of the most tumultuous periods in my life in recent memory. Have you ever had one of those feelings that things are going a little too well? Like you're being set into the air but you're just waiting for the hard spike to knock you to the ground? I had that feeling on March 1st. In February, the writing was on the wall for me to get out of my job at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where I had worked for about 5 years. Layoffs were looming and me being without work was not an option. I decided to be proactive and search. By mid Feb, I had two companies bidding for me. The salary offers just kept getting higher and higher until one of the two companies finally offered $115,000 per year plus profit sharing. The catch? I had to drive to Mill Valley (approximately 60 miles each way). The money was too much to pass. I had been severely underpaid at LLNL for years and this represented a chance to bump my resume in the right direction.
Remember, gas prices were just starting to rise at this time. There was no way I was going to put that many miles on my Corvette. Aside from the cost, it's a stick and I just always cherished the fact that I had so few miles on it. So when I got the offer letter, I took it straight to a Toyota dealer and bought a new Camry Hybrid figuring I'd just drive it into the ground.
When I got to the new job, the energy was very bad right away. For one thing, my new boss never offered to take me to lunch on my first day with the team - a first for me. In fact, he looked right past me and asked one of my co-workers if he wanted to have lunch. Also, they were offering me more money than I'd ever been paid and I assumed it was because they wanted my expertise. What I wasn't counting on was that everyone in the department was insecure. None of them had ever worked in a large corporation (including the boss) and when I made suggestions, everyone got very defensive and offended. There was zero respect for me and the feeling was mutual. One notable instance was when I was installing a new UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply) for a user and I noted that none of the other UPS's installed had the USB cable running from the UPS to the computer (for those non-techies, this cable's job is to inform the computer that it is running on battery and this lets the computer do a proper shutdown). When I mentioned that this cable was missing on all the UPS's, they said, "Oh yeah, we just toss those. They're only for managing the UPS and we don't need that." I don't know if the look on my face gave my thoughts away, but I was thinking, "You're kidding me right? Please tell me you're joking." They weren't.
Things went downhill from there. A week after I started, a new person was to start and he was to work for me. When he showed up, I told him that I was his boss and took him to lunch (I wasn't going to do to him what was done to me). We got to know each other a bit over the next week. Then he gave me his notice. It turns out, that my boss promised him my job, then promised me my job and I got it because I started first. His quitting caused a serious uproar and put a spotlight onto my boss' inadequacies which were clear to me from day one. The CEO and the CFO began discussing via email terminating my boss. The PC tech snooped on the CFO's machine and found an email. He went straight to my boss with it. Once this got out, the PC guy was let go, and my boss was let go shortly afterwards. With my boss out of the way, it became clear to HR that he had lied to them about my position and the CEO decided that they were just too small of an IT department to have a manager at my level so they let me go.
So I'd given up my career at LLNL, bought a new car, and just two months later was unemployed.
I went back to the first company and they honored their offer and hired me, thank God, but the pay was significantly lower and the car payment was straining my finances. On top of it all, I discovered that Wells Fargo had not been collecting money each month for the past year for my property taxes and homeowner's insurance. So I was one year delinquent on taxes and my homeowner's insurance was being canceled. They paid all the back taxes and insurance but it raised my house payment $600 a month for a year. My finances were going to crack under the strain and it became clear that I needed to sell the Corvette.
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