2003–Present

I don't know what happened but jobs in IT seemed to dry up around that time.  I could definitely get an internship but forget about getting paid for it.  Unfortunately, these opportunities didn't come until after unemployment dried up.

So I had some bills to pay.  Months went by; in those months hundreds of resumes were emailed/faxed.  In November 2003, I got a call from a temp company named Tiger.  After a interview and hours of testing in Word/Excel/PowerPoint, I was recommended for an interview at Spherion, head agency for Bear Stearns to work in their PresCenter.  After taking a test, I was recalled for a 2½ hour interview with the president of the PresCenter and with some of its staff.  I never felt so nervous for so long.  They wanted to see what I have done in the past; of course I never kept anything I dealt with Merrill (except some old training stuff).  At Merrill, there was a PresCenter staff and there was a graphics/maps staff.  Bear's PC does everything (as I now know), so PhotoShop/Illustrator is important. 

I don't know what I said but it was good enough to get into a 2 week training stint; of course I had to pass and I did.  I started on the 5th shift (week-ends on the graveyard shift).  As I have said somewhere, I've been very lucky to have worked with some great people in my life; once again this was the case at Bear.  At Merrill, all their pitch books are done in PowerPoint, at Bear they're done in Word.  So everything (well most things) I learned at Merrill had to be in Word @ Bear.  My Word skills at the beginning were pretty poor (because I forgot everything; but now are good).  Not only that I had to learn how to create Bear shows (PPT slideshows) and logo creation in Illustrator.  Then there's the India pod (where we outsource work).

The location is pretty sweet (47th and Madison); when the subways run it is only a 20 minute commute, but the problem is that subways don't run (very well) on week-ends.  Compared to the 30+ minute commute to ML, this was pretty nice.  But then again I had to walk across Rockefeller Center.  98% of the time this is no problem, but this past holiday season, #$%^&*!!!!  Too many tourists.  Oh well. 

2001–2002 (Written in ~February 2002)

Let's see where have I been in the past year or so. In February of 2001, I moved back to New York City from California. I necessarily didn't want to move back, but the job market in my field of expertise (read: administrative) seemed to dry up. Administrative work, while definitely not my favorite line of work, is something I can do well, but usually I become bored with it. My last job was working in the law department at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in San Francisco. The lawyer I worked for was really a nice guy; in fact all the lawyers in that department were all nice (yes, I know, surprising). It just came down to the point where I was becoming responsible for other people hundreds of miles away to do their job and in the end, it was becoming increasingly more and more difficult and frustrating to do.

After a few tough months, I decided to come back to New York. A 4-day train ride later and here I was. New York seemed so different; definitely not the same town I left five years previous. The main thing I concentrated on after coming back was finding a job. After a few interviews and a lot of faxing of résumés, I found a temp-to-perm job working at Pitney Bowes. Pitney, a subsidiary of Merrill Lynch, handles desktop publishing duties for all the analysts and associates of Merrill. After a two week training stint, I started in the beginning of March down at the World Financial Center, across the street from the World Trade Center complex.

The people in my department were really nice; for all the jobs I've worked at, I've been very lucky to work with nice people. They showed me the ropes and after a short while, the job became second nature. Merrill Lynch follows a standard template design they created for all their MS-PowerPoint presentations, so learning what how to embed tables the correct way and using a consistent look became easy over time.

Of course, life isn't perfect. There are some bankers who are always going to cause trouble, whether intentional or unintentional. The best way to deal with a situation is to listen to what the banker wants and to use common sense. Usually that worked, but of course life isn't perfect. Luckily only a small percentage of the bankers were this troublesome. Those fortunate few were dubbed nicknames by our group (secretly, of course). There was Chuckles the Angry Clown, Timmy (from South Park), Captain Planet, Punky Brewster and a few others I'm sure. It was meant in good fun and to relieve the tension felt in the office.

One of the reasons why working downtown was beneficial to me was of The Chubb Institute is right across the street from my office. I've always been tinkering around computers ever since about sophomore year in high school. In my lifetime, I've gone from using an IBM-XT to a 486/50, Pentium 90, Pentium Pro 200 and a P2-450. Operating systems from DOS 2.1–6.22 and Windows 3.1, Windows 95, 98, NT, OS/2, System x and a few flavors of Linux. My main strength lies in troubleshooting both hardware and software. You learn by doing, mucking around in the innards of a computer, screwing up and learning from mistakes. That was what I was interested in and doing for many years; the problem with doing this for a living is you can't get any "real" experience unless you have a job in it. By the same token, you can't get a job in without experience. Argh!

I've volunteered as a moderator for some software and hardware sites: I was both a moderator (Oakland) and a senior moderator (San Francisco) on the Dial-Up Wide Area Gaming Organization (DWANGO), then a premiere gaming service in the mid-to-late '90's, before the service disappeared to the Far East and Asia. I've also moderated on some hardware/software sites' discussion boards: Hardware Central and their sister site SharkyExtreme before resigning from both in 2001.

Suffice to say, I do have experience with computers. So I went to Chubb to prove it. I originally met with a guidance counselor to pursue a degree in helpdesk/troubleshooting, but after taking the standard entrance exam and scoring very highly on it, he thought it would be a better idea to pursue a network engineering degree. After some careful thought, I agreed and began my studies in late May in Hardware Fundamentals and Operating Systems, Network System Administration, Network Workstation/Server Administration, Large Enterprise Network Administration and Network Technologies.

The weather in New York slowly started to turn from the oppressing summer heat to a cool early Fall in September. One nice thing I thought about going to work shortly after joining Pitney was I would be totally underground except for the half block I had to walk from the house to the subway (which would become more useful when the weather turned much colder). But not yet, the weather was only about 70 degrees, actually quite nice for this time of year. In the plaza, there was a giant fountain that was nice to sit around before my shift started.

Of course, things changed very much on September 11th.

After leaving the fountain that morning and walking across the North Bridge, I arrived at the office and began work as usual. Up until about the previous 3 weeks, a typical 8-hour shift meant 8 hours of work. But the past few weeks, due partly to the Labor Day holiday, work was very slow. That morning, I was lucky; I got a job that would last a couple of hours. Tuning out the c-rap radio station that was on (we all took turns with the radio, but today was not mine), I went to work.

I remember hearing a noise, but that was usual. There was always noise going on somewhere. Literally minutes later, our Presentation Coordinator came rushing in from making his rounds and told us "One of the towers is on fire! We have to go!" We all looked at him like 'yeah, right.' "No joke, we have to go now!" He grabbed his jacket and ran out the door. We were close behind him, along with several other bankers and made our way down to Vessey Street. By the time we got there, we were entertaining rumors that it was possibly a missile or a small plane had hit the building.

My first reaction was I originally thought Merrill's South tower (2 WFC) had been hit and I thought that our building could have been hit. Then it sunk in, once I walked further up the street. A lot of smoke and paper filled the air around the tower. We all watched talking amongst ourselves, listening to various rumors. We really didn't know what to do; we weren't sure if we should go back to work as we saw many people going back into our building. The next thing I know is I thought a crane was falling on top of me from one of the buildings.

From out of nowhere, in about five seconds of time, the audio on the street went from the sounds of normal talking to the loudest mechanical sound I have ever heard in my life. I was looking up trying to find out where this sound was coming from and could not. If the sound hadn't stopped, I would have had to cover my ears. Then the screaming began and the mass running of people by me. It was like the Godzilla movies; having literally hundreds of people run past you screaming. If I weren't standing next to a tree, I probably would have been flattened. I don't remember hearing an explosion, but I do remember seeing debris and a fireball; I thought it was originally an explosion from the first tower.  I was wrong.

At this point, our group got split up and I was only left with two people I knew. We mulled about trying to make sense of what was going on when I heard someone next to us say that a second plane had hit the other tower. This was too much; how the hell could, not one but two planes, hit both towers?? It didn't make sense and now I could tell something was very wrong. I had to get out of there; just for the fear of the unknown. I told both of them that I hoped to see them tomorrow because I wasn't sure if I would. I made my way around the block and walked back up to West Street. Hearing the commotion of the crowd, I knew what they were reacting to: people were jumping. First one then another; again and again and again. It will be a sound I will never forget. I pulled out my mp3 player and cycled through the songs until I found Metallica's   Bleeding Me and just had the song repeat forever. This was the worst day of my life, and it was only 9:30 in the morning.

Thousands of people were everywhere now and emergency vehicles were literally driving 90 mph down the West Side Highway. I got a block or two east and looked at the towers. What I saw made me sick and horrified; two huge holes were in each tower; papers were floating around like confetti. People were crying all around me; many looked on and said nothing. I continued east. I finally got to the Chambers Street subway and tried to get an uptown train but after about ten minutes of waiting, an announcement came over saying all the subways on the west side were closed. I walked upstairs and outside; I hoped to go to City Hall and grab another subway that ran up the East Side. Luckily, it was still running and got on.

It seemed that most people in the subway didn't know what was happening; I just sat trying to make sense of what was going on. There was no way that this could be any accident. I finally got uptown to 86th street; once outside I tried to make a phone call on a pay phone to let family know I was okay, but all the phones were dead. I got on the cross-town bus trying to get home but all cross-town traffic was closed so I got out and walked across Central Park. I ran into a group of people at the baseball fields and finally heard actual news of the events, although I wish I hadn't. I finally made it home at about 10:30a.m. Truly a morning I will never forget. 

Nearly three weeks would go by before I would go back to work or school.  It wasn't because I didn't want to; it was because there was no way to.  The place where I had spent dozens of hours a week, for months on end, was literally gone.  Couldn't go to work because it was damaged.  Couldn't go to school because it was damaged, if not downright destroyed.  All I could do was watch television and try not to get angry.  After what seemed like months, Merrill set up shop in their Broadway location at the end of September and I went back to school soon after that.  My classmate Angela (who also worked at Merrill at a different department than I did) was trapped at the Krispy Kreme near 5 WTC when the attacks occurred.  She was there literally seconds until the South tower fell.  She was very lucky to have survived.

Nearly a year and about 20 miles later at Chubb's Jersey City campus, I "graduated" with my Network Engineering degree/certificate.  It was not especially fun to run like hell after work on Friday, catch a PATH train to Jersey and spend 3+ hours learning about TCP/IP on Friday nights only to have to do it all over again (the commute, anyways) early Saturday morning but there was no choice in the matter, except to bow out and start all over.  The plus side is we got to keep our excellent teacher for the rest of the curriculum instead of turning over teachers each course.

Then in September 2002, Pitney Bowes decided for whatever reason to terminate all the temporary help in the Center.  I would imagine that was about 75+% of staff.  I have no ill-will about this decision.  9/11 eff-ed up everyone's lives (mine included), but since we got up back and running after the attacks work had gotten really slow.  Even after we moved back to 250 Vessey Street, work continued to be slow.  It did pick up now and then, but for a lot of the time, it was damn slow.  And yet we still got paid.  A year's worth of paychecks for almost practically nothing (at least to prior to 9/11).  The only thing I am miffed at is I got "hired" not once but twice to full time opportunity to work in the Center (once prior to 9/11, the other time after we moved back to 250).  Nothing ever became of it (nor others that I've spoken to that were also in the same situation).