The Wrong Job

Well, I guess I should continue writing up the biography for a bit. Now, where was I? Oh yeah, I made it through college…

So I actually did finally graduate and received my Bachelors of Science in Electrical/Computer Engineering. This may surprise many of you that have actually read all of my blog postings; but I used to be a rather intellectual person. Not that I would consider myself a dolt or anything now – it’s just that old saying about “the more you learn, the more you learn you do not know…” I haven’t learned nearly enough to know nothing yet; however I feel that I’m getting close…

Anyway, it was actually in December of 1993 when I attended my graduation ceremony. It was a rather gala event. It was held at the Detroit Civic Center and there were hundreds of students graduating. Of course most of them were receiving liberal arts degrees – I’m still not really sure what this is supposed to get you – and from the pandemonium that was displayed in that group, most of these students were the “partiers”. I (with Karen by my side, by the way…) was in the much smaller group that was graduating from the engineering school. Or so I thought…

Funny thing is, shortly after the graduation ceremony (maybe a month or so) I received a letter from the university at my parent’s house (yes, I moved back in with the parents…) stating that I had actually not sufficiently completed all of the requirements for my BSEE. I received a D in this one class – Signals and Systems. Apparently this wasn’t good enough as – completely unbeknownst to me – this was a class that you were required to get a C or better in. I was a bit shocked…

The worst part about it was that I had already accepted a job offer with EDS. (If you’re unaware of EDS, they’re basically an ITS – Information Technology Services – company. They do not do engineering. The recruiter told me they did, but they don’t…) The thing is that I was pretty sure that this job offer was only valid if I actually had the BSEE that I informed them I had. I was now apparently being informed that the graduation ceremony that I attended was merely a ruse and that I had not actually qualified fully for my BSEE degree. But wait! I distinctly remember checking into this earlier. Somebody was mistaken here…

You see, at the beginning of my Signals and Systems class I had actually inquired with the professor on whether or not the class required a C or better to pass. He told me that it wasn’t one of the required courses. Well, I was a bit burned out on the whole university thing by that time and was just trying to make it all end. I also had a pretty mean class load that semester and decided to devote more of my energy to the classes that I knew required higher grades. Besides, Signals and Systems? I didn’t want to work as an analog engineer for some power company or something anyway; analog engineering didn’t interest me. I wanted to be a digital engineer – you know, work on ICs and digital logic, stuff like that – so I basically blew off the Signals and Systems class. After all, I was told that it wasn’t one of the required courses…

Apparently I was told wrong. I now had this letter informing me differently. Oh well, what choice did I have? I headed straight back to campus and met with the dean of engineering. Amazingly enough, after I had informed him of my situation as well as what I had been told by the professor, he was actually willing to work with me on this little problem. He told me that all I needed to do was to get a signed statement from the professor in question that stated he mistakenly informed me of the requirements and I would be able to get my degree. I would have to retake the class if I ever decided to further my education at W.S.U. – go for the ole MSEE or PhD – however this meant nothing to me. As far as I was concerned, my schooling was done. I had no intentions of prolonging it in order to get a graduate degree. I just needed to get a signed statement…

Expecting that this mission might not be very easily accomplished, I found out the room and time that this professor was lecturing and went to have a talk with him. As I entered the room, I actually saw that Sharon (Karen’s twin sister) was enrolled in the class. This actually has nothing to do with this story, but I found it rather amusing… The professor (sorry that I don’t remember his name or anything … this was quite a while ago) entered the room and I explained my predicament to him. Surprisingly enough, he agreed to sign the letter that I had written up. Nice guy. I was expecting a bit of resistance on this, but he seemed more than happy to admit to his mistake. I headed back to the dean’s office with the signed document and received my degree shortly afterwards. I guess sometimes miracles do happen…

It was then time fore me to become one of those self sufficient adults. I had a job with EDS that was paying me something like 35k a year and I quickly moved out of my parent’s house and into my first apartment. I traded in my little Geo Metro XFi and got myself a brand new Pontiac Firebird Formula! Yeah, things were beginning to finally start coming together.

The job, however, most definitely did not turn out to be what I was led to believe by the recruiter. As I stated earlier, EDS does not do engineering – at least not what I had envisioned engineering to be. I was actually signed on in their ESE (Engineering Systems Engineer) program and told that I needed to complete a three year training program before I would even be granted the title of ESE. Oh well, three more years of training … I’ve pretty much spent my entire life in training up to this point … what’s three more years? I was thinking that I would finally be doing what I wanted to do at the end of these three years, so I did it. I was wrong, but I did not know this then…

The ESE training program is actually broken down into three portions. You begin as a BA (Business Associate) for about a year and a half. As a BA, you are supposed to be learning the business side of ITS. From my recollection, it mainly consisted of going to a lot of meetings (where, of course, you had little to no influence) and basically getting paid to be a “fly on the wall”. I spent a lot of my time during my BA stint driving back and forth between the GM World Headquarters building (downtown Detroit) and the EDS campus that was located up in Troy. My official office was actually located at the GM Tech. Center in Warren, so I drove there as well. I did a lot of driving…

Did I accomplish anything during this time in my life? Sure. Not much professionally, but it gave me the opportunity to do some volunteer work that I actually very much enjoyed. You see, it didn’t take me too long to figure out that the responsibilities that this job gave me could have easily been accomplished by a somewhat well trained monkey. I decided to do something useful with my spare time and provided computer training at the Boy’s & Girl’s Club of America, became a tutor (and much needed friend) to this sweet little 6th grade girl that had been having a rough life and even dressed up as Barney the Dinosaur at one of the co-sponsored EDS/GM events. I was using my spare time to actually give back to the community. I did this throughout most of my BA stint; however I must admit that I have not done any volunteer work since. If there’s one positive that can be said about the first portion of EDS’ ESE program, it’s that it does give ample opportunities to help out in the community.

At the end of my BA rotation, I actually moved to a furnished apartment in Southfield, Michigan where I spent something like 9 to 12 weeks completing the ESE Technical Training program. What this ended up being was really nothing more than a crash course in Structured C programming and ITS system development using mock customers. It was tough and I spent many nights working on projects until the wee hours of the morning. This, however, was not engineering as far as I was concerned. Yeah, I suppose you could classify it as software engineering, but I didn’t get my BSEE to become a software engineer. All the signs were telling me that I may have made the wrong decision when I took the job with EDS; however the TA (Technical Associate) rotation was coming next. Was this going to be where I could finally start doing the work that I had expected to be doing since graduation? I could only hope…

It was then that I decided to attempt to finally get away from the Detroit metropolitan area. I never was much of a fan of the Detroit area and I figured that there had to be something better somewhere else. I was still single and had nothing keeping me in the area (except for my family and friends, but I knew that they would understand) so I figured that the time had come for me to expand my horizons a bit. I spoke with my then manager about wanting to move out of state for my TA portion of the training and was lucky enough to be presented with the opportunity to move down to Boca Raton, Florida and work with the EDS group there. I had never even been to Florida but I couldn’t let this opportunity pass. I took the position.

The move was actually pretty easy. EDS made all the arrangements for the move and a truck basically showed up at my apartment one day and a couple guys packed up all my stuff and loaded it on the truck. I then hopped into my Z28 with my buddy Karl (the Formula got totaled when this drunk driver decided to meat me in a head to head battle a few months earlier) and drove down to Florida. We made a stop at the MGM Universal Studios park along the way and Karl hopped on a plane home after we arrived in Boca Raton. I stayed behind in Boca Raton and was eager to start my new life.

The eagerness quickly wore off unfortunately… I soon found out what being a TA in Boca Raton was. Other than a rather interesting assignment doing system testing at the IBM, Boca Raton campus (testing of a rather interesting voice computer control system dubbed ‘Human Centered Computing’ – which got cancelled shortly before IBM closed down the Boca Raton site) the work down there was pretty boring. It ended up being pretty much work on conversions of old outdated databases and various other extremely boring jobs. I mean at one time they even flew a group of us up to Washington D.C. for a couple weeks to basically answer phones. I mean how stupid is that? The impression that I got was that the people working for EDS down there just really liked living in Florida. I think they would take any work offered just so that they could remain there.

I, on the other hand, was beginning to crack. It was more than obvious to me now that the recruiter had blatantly lied to me. I was never going to be able to start doing any hardware engineering with EDS. My performance at work took the brunt of this realization and I know I couldn’t have been much fun to be around. Interestingly enough, it was then that I received an unexpected phone call.

You guys remember Sandy, right? The one that moved to Colorado to marry some guy a few years back… Well, out of the clear blue I get a call from her. I find out that things didn’t work out between her and her fiancé and she never actually took the plunge. She was still living in Colorado; however she was still single. I don’t recall whether she told me she had a boyfriend or not, but I do recall that she was telling me that I needed to move out to Colorado. I informed her of how unhappy I was with my job and with where I was living (Florida – a great place to visit, but you might want to think twice before moving there to live…) and she basically told me to move to Colorado. She said that there were tons of technical companies there and that I should easily be able to get a job. And get this – she told me that we could get an apartment together.

Of course I thought she was just trying to cheer me up a bit and didn’t really take it seriously. I mean come on … move to Colorado and get an apartment with Sandy? I couldn’t do that. She wouldn’t actually do it, would she? Well, I believe it was about one week later when I actually got fired from my job at EDS. My negative attitude had finally caught up with me and the reason they gave for letting me go was that I apparently was overheard by a customer when I was explaining to a fellow employee there just how stupid I thought the system that they were designing was. Oh well, I really didn’t care. I actually thanked my boss when he informed me, drove back to my apartment and picked up the phone.

I called Sandy. I told her that I was now unemployed and was thinking about taking her up on her offer. Her response to this, amazingly enough, was that she would start looking for an apartment right away. Shortly there after she called me back and told me that she found the perfect place in Longmont. It was perfect because Longmont is located right in the middle of Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins. I could look for work in any one of these cities. Holy cow! My life was pretty much in the dumps as far as I was concerned. I was jobless and living in a place that I had grown to despise. I was thinking that I was going to have to move back up to Detroit; but fate is a funny thing. Thanks to Sandy, I was actually going to move to Colorado.

Well, it’s getting a bit on the late side here and I really need to be getting to bed. I’m also pretty sure that I am currently typing words that will be seen by very few. If you’re actually reading this story, I really must thank you. I mean I know my life really isn’t that interesting – heck, I’ve been living it – but writing it out has been rather interesting for me. I’m hoping that it may have been a bit interesting for you as well and I will continue the story at some later time.

bis später,

Coriolis