Phil's Ramblings and Rantings

I matriculated at the University of Wisconsin in 1964, but left after five semesters to pursue a career as a Nuclear Weapons Technician (a clean bomb is a happy bomb!) under the tutelage of Uncle Sam's Air Force.

After being stationed in Texas, Colorado, Delaware and British Columbia (my "overseas" assignment), I got sent to Grand Forks, North Dakota. I liked it so much, I stayed there for another two years after I got out of the Air Force to finish my Bachelors' Degree.

I graduated from The University of North Dakota with a Geology Degree in 1975. I spent six years in grad school at the University of Calgary and Montana State University with zilch to show for it, but that's another story.

In 1979, both of my grandparents had just died, my mother died of lung cancer, and finally, on my birthday, my GI Bill and my wife ran out on me. I decided to drop off the face of the earth and/or join the circus. I quit my geological career.

My REAL education began when I quit being a geologist, and obtained a position as a night auditor at the Holiday Inn of Bozeman, Montana. My first night on duty there I chatted with Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome and all-around philosopher.

And then thing got really surreal, as I served G. Gordon Liddy, Timothy Leary, Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw, etc., etc. etc. I met all sorts of creatures of the night.

But what does this all have to do with education, and how did I wind up in Sunny Southern California, you ask?

I thought I had been around a bit, but when I started working the 'graveyard' shift behind the front desk, I saw and experienced things I never would have believed if I had seen them on "reality" TV.

Two years at the H.I. of Bozeman was enough, I thought, so I moved about a tankful of gas to the northwest along Interstate 90, to Spokane. Spokane was, among other things, a mining town: a center for exploration for uranium, precious metals (silver and gold) and base metals (lead, zinc, copper, etc.). I thought I might resume my geology career. But timing is everything, and I arrived in Spokane the day after the Bunker Hill Mine, the area's biggest, closed down.

A job dropped into my lap as a night auditor at the local Holiday Inn, which I had to snap up, since I wasn't as robust as I am now, and couldn't go more than a week or two without eating.

Spokane was an Air Force town, with Fairchild AFB on the outskirts. The B-52's and KC-135's flying overhead made me somewhat nostalgic for the "good old days" when I was in the Air Force, and things were predictable. Yes, they were predictably screwed up, but they were a known quantity. I found out that there was an Air National Guard unit that had free flights to Hawaii once a month, so I signed up.

It turned out I had signed up to be a Tech Controller, so I got a six months' all-expenses-paid vacation in beautiful Biloxi, Mississippi, where I lived in an apartment on the beach and went to school for six hours a day, studying electronics and communications protocols.

After returning from Air Force Tech School, the Holiday Inn wanted me to go back to my old job as Night Auditor, but I was ready for a change. I wanted to put my newfound communications skills to work, so I took a chances as a salesman for a small two-way radio shop in Spokane.

Here was my chance to learn about the business world, up on the highwire without a net. I taught myself the vagaries of FCC rules, selling goods and services (business band FM two-way radios, pagers, mobile phones, and repeater service) to businesses of all sizes. I sold these gadgets to farmers, firemen, policemen, military and even sold a mobile phone to a local pimp (installed into a canary-yellow Cadillac ElDorado). My territory was Eastern Washington, Northern Idaho, and Western Montana.

As I got things going at the sales job, the commissions began to trickle in. But after about six months, my Guard unit called me with the opportunity to go on a military "exercise" in southern Spain for what was supposed to be three weeks. I jumped at the chance to see the world, considering that my only "overseas" duty in the Air Force had been Canada. Well, after getting my shots and my orders, I found that the stay in Spain would be six weeks, not three. Lied to by Uncle Sam. Again. Go fig...

Rota, Spain is a fun place, and I got to take side trips to Sevilla, Malaga, Jerez, and even Tangier, Morocco. But six weeks is a long time to be gone from a job, especially one that pays only on commission. I got back from my Guard "bumming" to find that the business was in upheaval, kind of like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Activity apparently got back to normal after awhile, but finally the business died, and I had gotten myself way deep in debt with no means of support. I had to file a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, where you pay off your debts a dollar a week for the rest of your life (or so it seemed at the time!). I had to chalk it up as one of life's little lessons.

The Holiday Inn was under new ownership, and they asked me to do a reprise stint as Night Auditor. I was in no position to refuse. During the days, I photographed little leaguers and even did a few weddings and one high school reunion. All these things together helped me get my finances back in order, enough to save up for a one-way bus ticket out of town.

While in Anchorage, Alaska for a military exercise (in January of 1985), I met a fellow guardsman who owned a mortgage brokerage company in the Tacoma area. He convinced me that I was the sort of person who could be successful as a mortgage loan officer, and I agreed to give it try. So after returning from Anchorage and a second stay in Biloxi for a six-week tech school, followed by a four-week junket to the Philippines, I moved 300 miles west to the rainy side of Washington.

The mortgage brokerage turned out to be every bit as flaky as the communications business, and I saw the danger signs on the horizon. So one Sunday I opened the Sunday paper, and there was the ad with my name on it:

NIGHT AUDITOR

STOUFFER MADISON HOTEL

Another year of graveyard shift, but this time I was away from the public, like Quasimoto, in the accounting department, keeping the mini-mainframe computer running all night while pumping out all sorts of reports. Here began my introduction in earnest to the wonderful world of computing. I bought a Tandy 102 and signed up for CompuServe, which I accessed via my built-in 300-Baud modem.

One of my fellow 'weekend warriors' in the Air National Guard took pity on me and my constant tiredness from working all night as a night auditor, and hired me as a manufacturing engineer at the 'Lazy B' as some wags call that great manufacturer of airplanes in Seattle. He was specifically interested in my USAF experience as a nuclear weapons specialist. It turned out I had been drafted to work on the Stealth Bomber, Ronald Reagan's great WPA project.

Boeing was a wonderful place to learn new "stuff." I got shuffled all over the Puget Sound region: Auburn Fabrication Facility, Kent Space Center, Renton, Plant II, the "Windmill Shop", Metro and the Developmental Center. I also had a temporary assignment in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in August of 1987, to train the local guys in the ways of Boeing. For a time, I was moonlighting within Boeing, working my eight hours at the Black Box, then running up to the other end of Boeing Field to help with the flight test certification of the 747-400 by doing wiring diagrams in CATIA.

While I was in the Seattle area, I took lots of training in computer stuff, both on-hour and off-hour. I took CADAM, CATIA, advanced BASIC, C/C++, Artificial Intelligence using Lisp and Prolog, among others. I even took a class called "Airline Marketing". It was basically preparing salesmen to sell 100+ million dollar toys (what would the commission checks look like?). Fascinating, as Spock said.

Finally, in January of 1989, I was sent to Palmdale, California for final assembly and first flight of the recently-rolled-out B-2 Advanced Technology Bomber. Do you remember that news photo of the three aircraft on the assembly line? My desk was about 50 feet off to your left of the wingtip of the closest one. I got to crawl around inside the aft weapons bay, counting brackets, and inside the fuel tanks for who-knows-why, as you can probably imagine, since it was basically a military operation. Oh, yes, and the reason I was hired, it turned out, was to help develop the rotary launcher and bomb racks, but I only got involved with that a little, since the big push was to get at least one of them flying. And that we did, in July 1989.

But once First Flight occurred, everything was anti-climactic: paperwork, ass-covering, "configuration management". Since I was a regular Boeing employee surrounded by "job-shoppers" making at least three times as much as I, it looked attractive to me to try my hand at the contract employment world, working without a net. So I quit my employment with Boeing in August 1989. I took a couple months to see all the National Parks and Monuments in Southern California, and to take in a shuttle landing at Edwards AFB, only 30 miles from my apartment in Lancaster. I distributed resumes to every contract employment agency in the Antelope Valley and Los Angeles and Orange counties. By Thanksgiving I was doubting my wisdom, and by Christmas I was doubting my sanity, having left the comfort of Boeing for the uncertainty of unemployment. I had a few job interviews, at Edwards AFB and in Glendale and Paramount, "down below", as they say in the high desert, but nobody was hiring between Halloween and New Year's Day.

At last, in January of 1990, a job job testing CAD-CAM software sort of fell into my lap, so I moved "down the hill" into the San Fernando Valley.

The six-month contract as a software test engineer lasted 2 and 1/2 years, through several layoffs of permanent employees. But I persisted until I got a card from a recruiter for a nearly-identical job in San Diego - with a raise, no less. So another move was in order, and this time turned out to be the last "Adventure In Moving" experience so far.

In July of 1993 I met a person I thought was my soulmate, and married her and moved into her family home which we bought from her father. She left the marriage in 2000, but let me keep the house. Very curious...

I'm now at the end of the road. I can see Tijuana from my deck, and I have two dogs and a cat that put up with me. I left out numerous software jobs, the last of which ended in June of 2002, leaving me free to return to geology full-time, as I have done. Does this mean I won't move again? Not likely, as San Diego is getting too built-up and uptight for my tastes. Stay tuned!