As a kid growing up, I was a dreamer. I would have these dreams of running the auto parts store that my grandparents built and become a member of the Chamber of Commerce. Or getting in to local politics. Howell Twp. back then was a small town (even though its the largest town in Monmouth County, NJ). I never dreamed that I would leave Howell. Sure, I had been to other places, Florida for spring break, NYC and I still remember driving to Florida in my parents van to the Florida Keys with my cousins following us. Why did I need to leave Howell? My dreams were not that big. I just wanted to be married and have a kid or two.
What was I going to do? What else could go wrong with my life? What were the reasons that life was throwing these obstacles at me? Growing up my parents instilled in us (myself, my brother and sister) that unless someone kills you... if you get knocked down and you're still breathing ... Get up... brush the
dirt off ...take a stand... fight another day... figure out a way to get thru the wall in front of you.... BUT never give up!!
While I was never one to listen to my parents advice (who did ...we all knew everything when we were growing up...right?) these words always resonated with me. My parents did all they could to give the three of us what we wanted.... and sometimes there was disappointment. But disappointment was also a life lesson. Disappointment is a valuable lesson in life...without it ...you will never understand why its important to get up and fight & work for what you want in life. No life is perfect. Not in the here and now ... or in the next life. If life was always perfect... we wouldn't understand heart break... death... joy ... love ... sorrow ... or the reasons that things just happen with no explanation.
I consider myself a person of science... not in the traditional way... but in the sense that everything happens for a reason. Even if it's not visible or explainable there is a reason that an action or reaction occurred.
...So, I deal with my DWI and lose my license. After a few months, I got an offer to stay with friends in California in 29 Palms. A beautiful desert town in the middle of the Yucca Valley near Joshua Tree national park . With no money... no car ... and no plan... I decide to take them up on the offer to go out to CA. My friends there help me get a drivers license... let me use one of their cars and I find a job in Palm Springs.
After working for 3 months... it was apparent that I was back to doing the same old thing... drinking... living paycheck to paycheck.... and going nowhere. My earlier dreams of the auto parts store washed a way....the friends I knew were all off at college or working on real careers. And I had lost touch with a lot of friends after leaving NJ. Remember that there was no Facebook...the internet as we know it...cell phones were not that portable... and who wants to call long distance (a call to California was about .25 cents a minute). Starting to drink more and hanging out with the wrong crowd.... it was time to do something drastic. I needed to change and quickly.
I started to ask the local stores in Palm Springs if they could get the full edition of the New York Times. There was an old commercial on TV for the Times in which the tag line was " I found my job in the New York Times". After several attempts to get the subscription.. I was able to get a store to order it for me. After about 500 resumes sent via snail mail... (again technology was not that advanced yet.... no real email or fax machines available to me) I got a response. The company sent me a letter stating that they were holding interviews in my area and that I was scheduled for one in Nov. The interviews were in NJ. I'm still in CA.
After much debate and begging my parents for the plane ticket home; I was able to get home and go to the interview. The interview was very interesting. It was held in the Hilton at Newark Airport, in a suite. When I arrived, a woman in her mid 50's asked me to come in and take a seat. We talked for about an hour. She liked my background at the time and the fact that I was willing to travel 100% of the time without reservations. She said that their was another person that she wanted me to interview with. Now I was thinking that this was going to come in the room while the first interviewer left but boy was I wrong. There was a door to an adjoining room and she opened the door to see if the interviewer there was done with the previous candidate. The second interviewer's name was Karen. Karen introduced herself and asked me to come in.
Now let me set the stage here a little ... I'm 23 soon to be 24. Raging hormones and Karen Hall is a very very attractive woman who was blonde, 5'3" about 105 lbs and wearing a skirt and low cut blouse. Karen was .....well .. very well endowed. Now she is sitting on one bed and I'm sitting on the other bed, facing her. I tried with all my might to keep my eyes from wondering ... and I believe that I caught myself more than once looking her up and down. I left there kicking myself because I kept telling myself I should have controlled my eyes a little better.
A month goes by and I get a call from this company about another interview. They tell me that they will pay me to go on this interview. Wait... They want to pay me to go on an interview? I had never hear of such a thing, but decided that I should take them up on it. And why not, it was guaranteed cash. I had asked my father to take me on the interview. Since the interview was in Somers, NY we decided that it was best to go up the night before. In the morning, we found the building; Pepsi's corporate headquarters.
I was so nervous, but tried to hide it. I met with three people, John Condatore from Fujitsu, Tom Hewitt from Pepsi and Linda from Fujitsu the HR rep. Tom was a character and looked a little like Soupy Sales ( that hair wouldn't move...LOL). My interview with John was great. We talked for a while about all things and how this project they were hiring for was going to only last 2 to 3 years.
At the end of the interviews, John and Linda walked me toward the elevators and out walks Karen Hall to talk with one of the other Pepsi team members. I thought for sure that she would tell them not to hire me because I was googling (and not looking on my phone google) her during the interview in Newark. John thanked me for coming and put me on the elevator. As I was waiting, I heard Karen say that she met with me and that I would make a good hire. WOW. Didn't see that coming. That was Oct of 1989. November goes by ...no word from Fujitsu. December goes by ...nothing. Well at least I got paid for going on the interview.
It January 1990 and its cold. I get a page from my mother (yes we had pagers back then not the cell phones we have now). She tells me that there is a Fedex package from a Fuji company. I didn't really think about it at the time... I just was out with friends and told her that I would deal with it when I got home. At about 11pm that night, I got home and opened the package. To my surprise, there were several items; a check for $2k made out to me; a new hire letter; all kind of forms and plane tickets for Sunday afternoon flight to San Diego. It Friday night before I am to leave on Sunday. And I don't have a clue as to how to pack or dress for this new job but I have to do it all in a day.
And so that package was the start of my IT career which has flourished for the last 27 years. I have been blessed to work for some great technology companies and very smart people.
In my current role, I am the Hyper Converged Specialist for the north east working for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). And while there are the naysayers who will talk that HPE is not going to be able to compete in the IoT space... I tell you this. The Machine will change it all. I encourage you to watch and read about the Machine here... the machine.
I don't remember the exact moment, but there was definitely an epiphany that came to me. It might have been when I was working at Pep Boys in the mid 80's or when I was working at the Headliner or Stony Pony as a bouncer.
The thought of "is this it? Is this all that life has in store for me?" Things were not going so well for me and I felt that my life was getting out of control. I was working dead end jobs, making minimum wage and spending lots of time in bars or working in bars.
And then it hit me, I had reached a low point in my life that I thought, was only something in movies you see about guys who have had a rough life. The loaner. The outsider. The guy that no one took the time to understand. I had gotten a DWI. Lost my drivers license and lost my job.
You quickly learn who your friends are and the ones who really aren't your friends. Friends are supposed to be there when you need them most...and at this point, none of them were.
You quickly learn who your friends are and the ones who really aren't your friends. Friends are supposed to be there when you need them most...and at this point, none of them were.
What was I going to do? What else could go wrong with my life? What were the reasons that life was throwing these obstacles at me? Growing up my parents instilled in us (myself, my brother and sister) that unless someone kills you... if you get knocked down and you're still breathing ... Get up... brush the
dirt off ...take a stand... fight another day... figure out a way to get thru the wall in front of you.... BUT never give up!!
While I was never one to listen to my parents advice (who did ...we all knew everything when we were growing up...right?) these words always resonated with me. My parents did all they could to give the three of us what we wanted.... and sometimes there was disappointment. But disappointment was also a life lesson. Disappointment is a valuable lesson in life...without it ...you will never understand why its important to get up and fight & work for what you want in life. No life is perfect. Not in the here and now ... or in the next life. If life was always perfect... we wouldn't understand heart break... death... joy ... love ... sorrow ... or the reasons that things just happen with no explanation.
I consider myself a person of science... not in the traditional way... but in the sense that everything happens for a reason. Even if it's not visible or explainable there is a reason that an action or reaction occurred.
...So, I deal with my DWI and lose my license. After a few months, I got an offer to stay with friends in California in 29 Palms. A beautiful desert town in the middle of the Yucca Valley near Joshua Tree national park . With no money... no car ... and no plan... I decide to take them up on the offer to go out to CA. My friends there help me get a drivers license... let me use one of their cars and I find a job in Palm Springs.
After working for 3 months... it was apparent that I was back to doing the same old thing... drinking... living paycheck to paycheck.... and going nowhere. My earlier dreams of the auto parts store washed a way....the friends I knew were all off at college or working on real careers. And I had lost touch with a lot of friends after leaving NJ. Remember that there was no Facebook...the internet as we know it...cell phones were not that portable... and who wants to call long distance (a call to California was about .25 cents a minute). Starting to drink more and hanging out with the wrong crowd.... it was time to do something drastic. I needed to change and quickly.
I started to ask the local stores in Palm Springs if they could get the full edition of the New York Times. There was an old commercial on TV for the Times in which the tag line was " I found my job in the New York Times". After several attempts to get the subscription.. I was able to get a store to order it for me. After about 500 resumes sent via snail mail... (again technology was not that advanced yet.... no real email or fax machines available to me) I got a response. The company sent me a letter stating that they were holding interviews in my area and that I was scheduled for one in Nov. The interviews were in NJ. I'm still in CA.After much debate and begging my parents for the plane ticket home; I was able to get home and go to the interview. The interview was very interesting. It was held in the Hilton at Newark Airport, in a suite. When I arrived, a woman in her mid 50's asked me to come in and take a seat. We talked for about an hour. She liked my background at the time and the fact that I was willing to travel 100% of the time without reservations. She said that their was another person that she wanted me to interview with. Now I was thinking that this was going to come in the room while the first interviewer left but boy was I wrong. There was a door to an adjoining room and she opened the door to see if the interviewer there was done with the previous candidate. The second interviewer's name was Karen. Karen introduced herself and asked me to come in.
Now let me set the stage here a little ... I'm 23 soon to be 24. Raging hormones and Karen Hall is a very very attractive woman who was blonde, 5'3" about 105 lbs and wearing a skirt and low cut blouse. Karen was .....well .. very well endowed. Now she is sitting on one bed and I'm sitting on the other bed, facing her. I tried with all my might to keep my eyes from wondering ... and I believe that I caught myself more than once looking her up and down. I left there kicking myself because I kept telling myself I should have controlled my eyes a little better.
A month goes by and I get a call from this company about another interview. They tell me that they will pay me to go on this interview. Wait... They want to pay me to go on an interview? I had never hear of such a thing, but decided that I should take them up on it. And why not, it was guaranteed cash. I had asked my father to take me on the interview. Since the interview was in Somers, NY we decided that it was best to go up the night before. In the morning, we found the building; Pepsi's corporate headquarters.
I was so nervous, but tried to hide it. I met with three people, John Condatore from Fujitsu, Tom Hewitt from Pepsi and Linda from Fujitsu the HR rep. Tom was a character and looked a little like Soupy Sales ( that hair wouldn't move...LOL). My interview with John was great. We talked for a while about all things and how this project they were hiring for was going to only last 2 to 3 years.
At the end of the interviews, John and Linda walked me toward the elevators and out walks Karen Hall to talk with one of the other Pepsi team members. I thought for sure that she would tell them not to hire me because I was googling (and not looking on my phone google) her during the interview in Newark. John thanked me for coming and put me on the elevator. As I was waiting, I heard Karen say that she met with me and that I would make a good hire. WOW. Didn't see that coming. That was Oct of 1989. November goes by ...no word from Fujitsu. December goes by ...nothing. Well at least I got paid for going on the interview.
It January 1990 and its cold. I get a page from my mother (yes we had pagers back then not the cell phones we have now). She tells me that there is a Fedex package from a Fuji company. I didn't really think about it at the time... I just was out with friends and told her that I would deal with it when I got home. At about 11pm that night, I got home and opened the package. To my surprise, there were several items; a check for $2k made out to me; a new hire letter; all kind of forms and plane tickets for Sunday afternoon flight to San Diego. It Friday night before I am to leave on Sunday. And I don't have a clue as to how to pack or dress for this new job but I have to do it all in a day.
And so that package was the start of my IT career which has flourished for the last 27 years. I have been blessed to work for some great technology companies and very smart people.
In my current role, I am the Hyper Converged Specialist for the north east working for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). And while there are the naysayers who will talk that HPE is not going to be able to compete in the IoT space... I tell you this. The Machine will change it all. I encourage you to watch and read about the Machine here... the machine.
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