The events since I joined my dad's company have been pretty well chronicled here. In fact, this blog's entire raison d'etre has been to help me cope with the stress of it all. To briefly recap, though, I went to Austin in 2001 all full of piss and vinegar, fully expecting to set the foundation repair world on fire. However, the happy-silly go-go 90's were over by then and there was a different vibe in the air, I was about to learn.
Remember the scene in Forrest Gump when Forrest is in Vietnam and he describes how one day it just started raining and didn't stop for like 4 months? Well, that's what it was like when I got to Austin. The skies opened and central Texas, usually a rather arid place, experienced floods like it hadn't in decades. Flooding plays hell on foundation repair as it does all construction. Our profitability began to lag and money started to dry up. It wasn't long before plans for our Houston office (which I was supposed to lead) were shelved.
I once read a quote from a realtor, talking about how you never see downturns in the market until they are upon you. "It's funny," she said "everything was fine until one day; it was like someone blew a whistle that only dogs and buyers could hear." Well, that "vibe" I alluded to earlier began to register on our customers' antennae, too. Dell Computer began to shed jobs, throwing an economic chill over Austin. Suddenly sales, which had heretofore been quite easy, became harder to make. People suddenly weren't quite so eager to dip into their retirement accounts to prop up their foundations and instead spackled and painted their cracked walls instead. It was a scary time.
Since the Houston plans were cancelled, Dad asked me to go to San Antonio and take over the office from its existing manager, Jeff. Jeff had made it pretty clear that he didn't want to be a manager and just wanted to run leads and make sales. I didn't like it, but I didn't see that I had any choice in the matter so I of course agreed to go. I glumly broke the news to Erica, who had her heart set on moving back home to Houston and living close to her sister and mom, and she took it so well that it's a miracle that we didn't end up at the divorce court. It was not a happy time.
The middle of 2001 was a shaky time but we were doing our best to keep the ship righted. We were holding our own too, despite the fact that all property insurors either left Texas or stopped ofering the HO-B policy. Despite the fact that the Nasdaq was cratering, despite the corporate accounting scandals that kept rising up like bloated corpses from the bottom a lake. It looked like, despite all of this shit, we were on track to have what we were all fervently hoping would be an economic "soft landing." We kept hoping that until that awful day in September when a bearded madman sitting in a cave half a world away and 19 of his wild-eyed acolytes knocked down two of our skyscrapers and announced that history had returned to America, and had returned with a vengeance.
After that, every day working in the foundation repair business was a knife fight.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Catching up, chapter 3.75: Down on the up side
The 90's were a weird time. Wonderful but weird. Except for a few holdouts, communism had collapsed almost everywhere in the world and the U.S. suddenly found itself without rivals, bestriding the globe like a colossus. Francis Fukuyama, being deliberately provocative, coined the phrase "the end of history." Also, everybody was in love with our charming rogue of a president and this new thingy called the internet that futurists declared was going to unrecognizably change our world a few years hence. Despite the typical Democrat confiscatory tax rates, the economy roared. Internet then later dot-com entrepreneurs got filthy rich seemingly overnight. Companies like amazon.com, which had never turned a profit, nevertheless were capitalized at something like 800 times their earnings.
One of the major companies that emerged in the 1990's was Dell Computer Co. in Austin, Texas. Michael Dell began peddling computers that he assembled in his UT dorm back and the 80's and parlayed that into a multi-billion dollar empire. He created a lot of wealth in Austin (as his firm was the second largest employer in the city, second only to the State government itself) and it was this wealth that was the wellspring for my dad's success.
It seemed like everyone was getting rich back then. My dad was riding his rocket into orbit and my brother Rob announced his ambition to be a millionaire by the time he turned 30. One of my friends from my GE days, John, quit the company a few months after I left to become an claims adjuster and started his own firm. He and a partner took what they learned at GE filing VA and FHA default claims and started their own boutique specializing in just that. They were so successful that they even drove GE out of that niche of the market. When I last touched base with him, his firm had over 90 employees. It seemed like everyone was getting rich . . . except me.
That sounds self-pitying and to some extent, it is. Envy is a very powerful emotion and I had to deal with a lot of it back then. I always thought that the path to success was to become a credentialed professional of some type then work your ass off for 20 or more years building your career. Dad had always been a commission salesman his whole life and always encouraged me and my brothers to do the same. I resisted that because I saw how much he suffered at times. I had vivid memories of the years when he would have as many as 10 jobs a year. Always starting then stopping jobs, peddling flaky shit like Herbalife and storm windows and crap like that. Dad wasn't always unsuccessful back then, and in fact he did so well in the late 70's and early 80's selling tools that I was considered one of the rich kids in school, but for about 10 years after he and my mother divorced (when I was in my VERY impressionable teens) he drifted like a feather in the wind. In essence, my dad was a wildcatter and like all wildcatters, he had hit a long spell of dry holes. I told myself I wasn't going to be like that. That was my teen rebellion.
However, seeing dad's success as well as my brother's by 2000 led me to question a lot of my assumptions about life and eventually forced me to accept that I had taken the wrong lesson from his example back then. That's a pretty heart-wrenching experience, to realize that you've just spent the last 10 years of your life on the wrong track. So when he offered me a ticket to the party, I jumped at it. I was going to start a foundation repair office in Houston and learn house-flipping from him. I was going to take my place at the table. I was going to give Erica and the girls the kind of life they deserved. I resigned from my job in January 2001 and the next month, flew to Austin to begin my new career.
One of the major companies that emerged in the 1990's was Dell Computer Co. in Austin, Texas. Michael Dell began peddling computers that he assembled in his UT dorm back and the 80's and parlayed that into a multi-billion dollar empire. He created a lot of wealth in Austin (as his firm was the second largest employer in the city, second only to the State government itself) and it was this wealth that was the wellspring for my dad's success.
It seemed like everyone was getting rich back then. My dad was riding his rocket into orbit and my brother Rob announced his ambition to be a millionaire by the time he turned 30. One of my friends from my GE days, John, quit the company a few months after I left to become an claims adjuster and started his own firm. He and a partner took what they learned at GE filing VA and FHA default claims and started their own boutique specializing in just that. They were so successful that they even drove GE out of that niche of the market. When I last touched base with him, his firm had over 90 employees. It seemed like everyone was getting rich . . . except me.
That sounds self-pitying and to some extent, it is. Envy is a very powerful emotion and I had to deal with a lot of it back then. I always thought that the path to success was to become a credentialed professional of some type then work your ass off for 20 or more years building your career. Dad had always been a commission salesman his whole life and always encouraged me and my brothers to do the same. I resisted that because I saw how much he suffered at times. I had vivid memories of the years when he would have as many as 10 jobs a year. Always starting then stopping jobs, peddling flaky shit like Herbalife and storm windows and crap like that. Dad wasn't always unsuccessful back then, and in fact he did so well in the late 70's and early 80's selling tools that I was considered one of the rich kids in school, but for about 10 years after he and my mother divorced (when I was in my VERY impressionable teens) he drifted like a feather in the wind. In essence, my dad was a wildcatter and like all wildcatters, he had hit a long spell of dry holes. I told myself I wasn't going to be like that. That was my teen rebellion.
However, seeing dad's success as well as my brother's by 2000 led me to question a lot of my assumptions about life and eventually forced me to accept that I had taken the wrong lesson from his example back then. That's a pretty heart-wrenching experience, to realize that you've just spent the last 10 years of your life on the wrong track. So when he offered me a ticket to the party, I jumped at it. I was going to start a foundation repair office in Houston and learn house-flipping from him. I was going to take my place at the table. I was going to give Erica and the girls the kind of life they deserved. I resigned from my job in January 2001 and the next month, flew to Austin to begin my new career.
Catching up: Chapter 3.5
Mobile, Alabama (where James reached one of life's point of diminishing returns)
After moving to Mobile at the end of '95, we bought a house, our first, and began to make a life for ourselves. Things were slow our first year but they eventually picked up and I was soon working enough to earn upwards of $80,000 a year. For someone who was making less than a quarter of that just 3 years prior, it was a pretty heady time. This, however, is where the problems began.
Without going into irrelevant details, I will only say that I began having to work more and more hours at my desk to bill the number of hours I needed to bill in order to provide for me and my family. I loved the fieldwork that was involved in being a claims adjuster, taking photos of street intersections, measuring skidmarks, interviewing witnesses, etc. I loved all of that stuff. The problem, however, wass that that kind of work, general liability and casualty, didn't pay that well compared to some of the more arcane lines of claims that we as a firm specialized in. In Beaumont, we had plenty of casualty customers, but in Mobile, hardly any. Thus, I began to have to spend more and more time doing things that I didn't really like very much in order to make ends meet. Things like handling workers compensation claims. There's nothing inherently wrong or disagreeable with handling comp claims, it's just that doing this kind of work is a lot more cerebral than physical. It's a hell of a lot more deskwork and less skidmark work. And nobody, not a priest, not even a bill collector gets lied to about so many things as a WC claims adjuster. Don't get me wrong, having malingerers lie to me didn't break my heart or anything. And doing things like reading medical reports, processing medical bills and analyzing reserves are all necessary and legitimate aspects of the insurance claims business; it's just that they're not exactly the kinds of things that made me want to spring out of bed in the morning to get to work.
Eventually, as I had to work more and more in order to make ends meet (typically putting in 60 to 70 hours a week) my health and my marriage began to suffer. I stopped working out and began to gain weight. Erica and I started fighting, a LOT, and our sex life practically disappeared for about 2 years. By 2000, I was at my wit's end and felt like a fish that was swimming as hard as I could but was still falling behind because the current I was racing against was just going too fast.
Meanwhile, while I was doing everything I could just to keep my head above the waterline, my brother Rob was making obscene money working as an account rep for BMC Software and my dad, well, my dad had moved to Austin in the early 90's to ride the rising tide of real estate property values. He started flipping houses and decided, almost on a lark, to start his own foundation repair company when he couldn't find any decent contractors to give him bids on his investment properties. It was a classic example of the right man being in the right place at the right time. Dad starting the foundation repair company at that time was catching lightning in a bottle. It was him striking oil. It was his ship coming in at last. In 7 years, 1993 through 2000, he grew the company out of nothing to doing over 5 million a year in sales. He literally went from rags to riches, and when he told me that I could get rich too if I came to work for him, I jumped at the opportunity.
After moving to Mobile at the end of '95, we bought a house, our first, and began to make a life for ourselves. Things were slow our first year but they eventually picked up and I was soon working enough to earn upwards of $80,000 a year. For someone who was making less than a quarter of that just 3 years prior, it was a pretty heady time. This, however, is where the problems began.
Without going into irrelevant details, I will only say that I began having to work more and more hours at my desk to bill the number of hours I needed to bill in order to provide for me and my family. I loved the fieldwork that was involved in being a claims adjuster, taking photos of street intersections, measuring skidmarks, interviewing witnesses, etc. I loved all of that stuff. The problem, however, wass that that kind of work, general liability and casualty, didn't pay that well compared to some of the more arcane lines of claims that we as a firm specialized in. In Beaumont, we had plenty of casualty customers, but in Mobile, hardly any. Thus, I began to have to spend more and more time doing things that I didn't really like very much in order to make ends meet. Things like handling workers compensation claims. There's nothing inherently wrong or disagreeable with handling comp claims, it's just that doing this kind of work is a lot more cerebral than physical. It's a hell of a lot more deskwork and less skidmark work. And nobody, not a priest, not even a bill collector gets lied to about so many things as a WC claims adjuster. Don't get me wrong, having malingerers lie to me didn't break my heart or anything. And doing things like reading medical reports, processing medical bills and analyzing reserves are all necessary and legitimate aspects of the insurance claims business; it's just that they're not exactly the kinds of things that made me want to spring out of bed in the morning to get to work.
Eventually, as I had to work more and more in order to make ends meet (typically putting in 60 to 70 hours a week) my health and my marriage began to suffer. I stopped working out and began to gain weight. Erica and I started fighting, a LOT, and our sex life practically disappeared for about 2 years. By 2000, I was at my wit's end and felt like a fish that was swimming as hard as I could but was still falling behind because the current I was racing against was just going too fast.
Meanwhile, while I was doing everything I could just to keep my head above the waterline, my brother Rob was making obscene money working as an account rep for BMC Software and my dad, well, my dad had moved to Austin in the early 90's to ride the rising tide of real estate property values. He started flipping houses and decided, almost on a lark, to start his own foundation repair company when he couldn't find any decent contractors to give him bids on his investment properties. It was a classic example of the right man being in the right place at the right time. Dad starting the foundation repair company at that time was catching lightning in a bottle. It was him striking oil. It was his ship coming in at last. In 7 years, 1993 through 2000, he grew the company out of nothing to doing over 5 million a year in sales. He literally went from rags to riches, and when he told me that I could get rich too if I came to work for him, I jumped at the opportunity.
Catching up, chapter 3:
James tries to move his life forward by looking to the past(at least, that's how he rationalized it to himself at the time)
The events that I am relaying here happened over 4 years ago. Four years is a lot of time. Time to think and time to try to understand. Time also to ponder the timeless wisdom of old cliches, like this one: "you can't go back again." There's a reason cliches exist, I figure. Sure, they're often said by people when they're at a loss for original things to say, but that doesn't make them untrue. Cliches are, I think, distillations of wisdom. They're universal truths, boiled down to their essence and tied up in a pithy little package. They get an undeservedly bad rap, I think.
Back to our story, there I was back in 2004, fighting the growing realization that the foundation repair business, having been knocked on its ass by the end of the drought, the recession, and especially the change in the insurance environment, wasn't coming back any time soon if ever. I think my dad probably was fighting that realization himself, but was in denial about it. My dad was always the kind of person who subscribed to the old "tough times don't last, tough people do" mentality. When the tough times came, he would therefore contort himself into all manner of philosophical pretzels, twisting his neck and crossing his eyes, forever trying to find the illusory "silver lining" to the company's troubles.
I remember a movie from the 80's called "The Bounty." It was a Mel Gibson vehicle and in it, he chews more scenery than a termite colony. His "I am in hell!" scene was particularly unforgiveable. The movie however was salvaged by Anthony Hopkins who played Capt. William Bligh, the brilliant but cruel captain of the ship. I remember one scene where Bligh was forcing the crew to dance a jig on the deck of the ship. There was no music, just men awkwardly, and unhappily, dancing. In a confined space with rough men, it was probably necessary to ritually humiliate them from time to time like this simply to keep them in line and underscore that he was the master and would tolerate no bullshit from any of them. That was my dad.
Trying to be around him when it was obvious we were being pissed on and he insisted on going on about the beautiful golden hue of the rain made me want to scream. Dad doing this was I think his way of showing leadership, you know, keeping calm so the troops wouldn't panic; that kind of shit. But to me it was denial that bordered on insanity. It was also soul-wearying to be around him when he was like this, too. Every time someone would quit or we would have to fire someone, he would obsessively try to spin it into a positive, saying that doing that somehow renewed the company, how pruning the "dead wood" was healthy for the tree, etc. You can only hear so much of that kind of crap before you feel like fucking screaming. Frankly, I think Dad was just kind of perplexed at the time. The business had been through some tough scrapes before, but this one was different. He knew the ship was listing to port and taking on water but I don't think he had any idea how to stop it. His tough talk was just a way to try to convince himself that he was still in control of events, I think, when he was beginning to realize that he wasn't. He just couldn't bear to admit that.
Back in the early 90's I read in the newspaper about the new CEO of an oil company who was hired to take over the firm in the middle of a very tough economic time for them. I remember reading that in a show of solidarity with the rest of the company, he refused to let them decorate his office nicely when he came on board. He used furniture from the storage vault and made do with it until the company's fortunes turned around. That was a purely symbolic gesture but I thought a good one. That man had heart. My dad on the other hand, during the company's salad days, had grown a fondness for high living, going on snow-skiing and scuba diving jaunts every other month, even after the company's fortunes began to decline. Seeing him and my step-mother continue to live the diamond life like this while others were seeing their commissions dwindle by up to two-thirds didn't sit well with me at all, I can tell you.
By early 2004, all of my optimism and hope was just about beaten out of me. We had cut our expenses to the bone in San Antonio and still couldn't close enough sales to run the operation in the black. Dad had me on a salary but it was a subsistence salary and I couldn't really have a nice life on. Plus, Megan was about a year away from graduating high school and I knew I couldn't afford to pay for her college. When Dad kept rebuffing me when I'd ask him to help me get started in house flipping, I had to literally talk myself out of hating him.
The bottom line is that, stubborn as I am, by 2004 I was despairing that working for him was going to work out for me and my family. Thus, when my old boss called to do his bimonthly checkup of me, as I wrote earlier, he found me rather more receptive to the idea of picking up my shovel and resuming my old career in insurance claims.
A word about my old career. I went to work for my old firm (which I'll refer to as Ye Olde Firm from now on) in 1993. I began in the Beaumont, TX office as a staff adjuster and took to it like a duck to water. A year after going to work for them, Erica and I got married. 10 months after that, Courtney came into the world. 6 months after that, in October 1995, I was promoted to manage our new office in Mobile, Alabama. I felt like the world was my oyster. I was a happy newlywed and gaining a good reputation in my industry. It was truly a wonderful time.
The events that I am relaying here happened over 4 years ago. Four years is a lot of time. Time to think and time to try to understand. Time also to ponder the timeless wisdom of old cliches, like this one: "you can't go back again." There's a reason cliches exist, I figure. Sure, they're often said by people when they're at a loss for original things to say, but that doesn't make them untrue. Cliches are, I think, distillations of wisdom. They're universal truths, boiled down to their essence and tied up in a pithy little package. They get an undeservedly bad rap, I think.
Back to our story, there I was back in 2004, fighting the growing realization that the foundation repair business, having been knocked on its ass by the end of the drought, the recession, and especially the change in the insurance environment, wasn't coming back any time soon if ever. I think my dad probably was fighting that realization himself, but was in denial about it. My dad was always the kind of person who subscribed to the old "tough times don't last, tough people do" mentality. When the tough times came, he would therefore contort himself into all manner of philosophical pretzels, twisting his neck and crossing his eyes, forever trying to find the illusory "silver lining" to the company's troubles.
I remember a movie from the 80's called "The Bounty." It was a Mel Gibson vehicle and in it, he chews more scenery than a termite colony. His "I am in hell!" scene was particularly unforgiveable. The movie however was salvaged by Anthony Hopkins who played Capt. William Bligh, the brilliant but cruel captain of the ship. I remember one scene where Bligh was forcing the crew to dance a jig on the deck of the ship. There was no music, just men awkwardly, and unhappily, dancing. In a confined space with rough men, it was probably necessary to ritually humiliate them from time to time like this simply to keep them in line and underscore that he was the master and would tolerate no bullshit from any of them. That was my dad.
Trying to be around him when it was obvious we were being pissed on and he insisted on going on about the beautiful golden hue of the rain made me want to scream. Dad doing this was I think his way of showing leadership, you know, keeping calm so the troops wouldn't panic; that kind of shit. But to me it was denial that bordered on insanity. It was also soul-wearying to be around him when he was like this, too. Every time someone would quit or we would have to fire someone, he would obsessively try to spin it into a positive, saying that doing that somehow renewed the company, how pruning the "dead wood" was healthy for the tree, etc. You can only hear so much of that kind of crap before you feel like fucking screaming. Frankly, I think Dad was just kind of perplexed at the time. The business had been through some tough scrapes before, but this one was different. He knew the ship was listing to port and taking on water but I don't think he had any idea how to stop it. His tough talk was just a way to try to convince himself that he was still in control of events, I think, when he was beginning to realize that he wasn't. He just couldn't bear to admit that.
Back in the early 90's I read in the newspaper about the new CEO of an oil company who was hired to take over the firm in the middle of a very tough economic time for them. I remember reading that in a show of solidarity with the rest of the company, he refused to let them decorate his office nicely when he came on board. He used furniture from the storage vault and made do with it until the company's fortunes turned around. That was a purely symbolic gesture but I thought a good one. That man had heart. My dad on the other hand, during the company's salad days, had grown a fondness for high living, going on snow-skiing and scuba diving jaunts every other month, even after the company's fortunes began to decline. Seeing him and my step-mother continue to live the diamond life like this while others were seeing their commissions dwindle by up to two-thirds didn't sit well with me at all, I can tell you.
By early 2004, all of my optimism and hope was just about beaten out of me. We had cut our expenses to the bone in San Antonio and still couldn't close enough sales to run the operation in the black. Dad had me on a salary but it was a subsistence salary and I couldn't really have a nice life on. Plus, Megan was about a year away from graduating high school and I knew I couldn't afford to pay for her college. When Dad kept rebuffing me when I'd ask him to help me get started in house flipping, I had to literally talk myself out of hating him.
The bottom line is that, stubborn as I am, by 2004 I was despairing that working for him was going to work out for me and my family. Thus, when my old boss called to do his bimonthly checkup of me, as I wrote earlier, he found me rather more receptive to the idea of picking up my shovel and resuming my old career in insurance claims.
A word about my old career. I went to work for my old firm (which I'll refer to as Ye Olde Firm from now on) in 1993. I began in the Beaumont, TX office as a staff adjuster and took to it like a duck to water. A year after going to work for them, Erica and I got married. 10 months after that, Courtney came into the world. 6 months after that, in October 1995, I was promoted to manage our new office in Mobile, Alabama. I felt like the world was my oyster. I was a happy newlywed and gaining a good reputation in my industry. It was truly a wonderful time.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Catching up, chapter 2:
2004, James Bows to the Inevitable
About a month after my last entry in February 2004, I was at my desk in San Antonio when I got a phone call from my old boss Tom Abercrombie. I was in a shitty humor that day and probably shouldn't have even taken the call, but I was so mad at my dad (who maintained his insistence in the face of all evidence that our failures to make sales in San Antonio were solely due to my personal shortcomings and not to any economic reasons) and needed to vent about it. Now, as a bit of background, Tom never really stopped trying to rehire me after I resigned in 2001 and moved away from Mobile. He would call me every few months just to kind of take my temperature and I would usually politely demur when he would broach the subject of me coming back to work for the firm. I had cast my die, I had figured, and intended to see it through.
But on the day he called, I had a mouthful to say and just needed someone to listen. Tom's ear was as good as any and when he asked me how my business was, I plain let him have it with both barrells.
Shitty, I told him.
I lamented how the demise of the HO-B had effectively choked off over half of my market and I complained about the simple fact that no matter how much I said or how hard I worked on marketing, there was at the end of the day nothing I could do that would put money into my customers pockets that would make them be able to afford our service. We had explored everything, from helping them get home equity loans, home improvement loans, we even thought about financing them ourselves, to no avail. No matter how hard I hit it, no matter from what angle I hit it, the nut just wouldn't crack. And after three years of trying, I was frankly despairing of it. I was beginning to feel beaten working for my dad in San Antonio and was having to face that unhappy fact. Needless to say, Tom picked a very good day to call me.
We made an appointment for me to go and meet with him at his house the following week to discuss me rejoining the firm face to face. By agreeing to that meeting, I felt like I had crossed a Rubicon of sorts. Erica was ecstatic about it but my emotions were decidedly mixed. I had never really failed at anything in my life before and here I was about to run up the white flag on the foundation repair business in San Antonio. Plus, I would be quitting on my dad and that was just something that wasn't easy to do.
More later.
About a month after my last entry in February 2004, I was at my desk in San Antonio when I got a phone call from my old boss Tom Abercrombie. I was in a shitty humor that day and probably shouldn't have even taken the call, but I was so mad at my dad (who maintained his insistence in the face of all evidence that our failures to make sales in San Antonio were solely due to my personal shortcomings and not to any economic reasons) and needed to vent about it. Now, as a bit of background, Tom never really stopped trying to rehire me after I resigned in 2001 and moved away from Mobile. He would call me every few months just to kind of take my temperature and I would usually politely demur when he would broach the subject of me coming back to work for the firm. I had cast my die, I had figured, and intended to see it through.
But on the day he called, I had a mouthful to say and just needed someone to listen. Tom's ear was as good as any and when he asked me how my business was, I plain let him have it with both barrells.
Shitty, I told him.
I lamented how the demise of the HO-B had effectively choked off over half of my market and I complained about the simple fact that no matter how much I said or how hard I worked on marketing, there was at the end of the day nothing I could do that would put money into my customers pockets that would make them be able to afford our service. We had explored everything, from helping them get home equity loans, home improvement loans, we even thought about financing them ourselves, to no avail. No matter how hard I hit it, no matter from what angle I hit it, the nut just wouldn't crack. And after three years of trying, I was frankly despairing of it. I was beginning to feel beaten working for my dad in San Antonio and was having to face that unhappy fact. Needless to say, Tom picked a very good day to call me.
We made an appointment for me to go and meet with him at his house the following week to discuss me rejoining the firm face to face. By agreeing to that meeting, I felt like I had crossed a Rubicon of sorts. Erica was ecstatic about it but my emotions were decidedly mixed. I had never really failed at anything in my life before and here I was about to run up the white flag on the foundation repair business in San Antonio. Plus, I would be quitting on my dad and that was just something that wasn't easy to do.
More later.
Catching up, chapter 1:
Well, sports fans, when we last checked in, yours truly here was doing his dead-level best to hold onto his optimism in the face of a declining market and declining industry in the foundation repair business in south Texas. Before blowing all the dust off this old blog, I reread all my old entries and I thought I chronicled my frustrations rather well in dealing with trying to run a business on a shoestring budget with angry customers, frustrated management (i.e., my dad) and unmotivated employees. There's nothing I can add to all of that. All I can do is summarize what has happened since then before I can begin recording my history in real time again. So, without further ado . . . .
This thing still on?
Whoa--cough!--kinda dusty in here. Let me see if the lights still work. Yep, they do. I see a lot of old memories in here. All with dusty sheets covering them like old furniture. The dust is so thick it looks almost like snow, and kind of reminds me of the winter palace scene from Dr. Zhivago, when Zhivago and Lara ran off to his place in the Urals to get away from the Bolsheviks. I didn't mean to take a 5 year-long break from this blog, but that's the way it worked out. Like Bruce Springsteen said, "I went out for a ride and I never went back."
Until now, that is.
Good thing I covered everything up before I left. Hey, the lights still work so that's encouraging, right? Let's just pull these sheets back and see how everything survived the 5 years I was away. Hmm, couches still look good and, oh, here's my favorite chair. Ahh . . . it's still comfortable. No time to lounge around right now, though. I need to open these blinds and let some sunshine in. Some fresh air, too. There we go and, wow! Just look at the dust in this place! I'll need a leafblower to get it all out. And what's this, on the coffee table? Oh my God, look at this! It's a photo of me, Erica and the girls, circa 2003. Boy, have things ever changed since this was taken.
There's much to tell.
Until now, that is.
Good thing I covered everything up before I left. Hey, the lights still work so that's encouraging, right? Let's just pull these sheets back and see how everything survived the 5 years I was away. Hmm, couches still look good and, oh, here's my favorite chair. Ahh . . . it's still comfortable. No time to lounge around right now, though. I need to open these blinds and let some sunshine in. Some fresh air, too. There we go and, wow! Just look at the dust in this place! I'll need a leafblower to get it all out. And what's this, on the coffee table? Oh my God, look at this! It's a photo of me, Erica and the girls, circa 2003. Boy, have things ever changed since this was taken.
There's much to tell.
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