I was in higher education for a hair under seven years. Then I was in NoVa for a hair under seven years. Now I’ve been here for a hair under seven years – and somewhere in the month of May, I crossed a substantial milestone. I have now officially resided longer in Silicon Valley than I did in Northern Virginia.
This is a lot to swallow.
It doesn’t seem like seven years. On the one hand it’s been kind of turbulent, with three different employers (and arguably four different jobs) in that stretch. On the other hand, I’ve only had two mailing addresses, and one of them for only a little over a year (I’m not counting the three week stretch staying in my in-laws’ front room when we first arrived). If you look at my relationship with ‘er indoors, the majority of our time as a couple has been “married, living in California, in this house.”
A lot has changed since that day in July ’04 when I first saw my Saturn parked on a side street in Silicon Valley. The hair, let’s face it, has largely gone. Dr Martens went away, came back in steel toe, and gradually made room for sneakers. The leather jackets went into the closet, mostly to stay. The Saturn eventually gave way to a Rabbit, which now sits in the garage so I can commute by public transit again. The cigars and pipe gave way to nothing at all, and despite my best efforts, no adequate replacement for Ireland’s Four Provinces was ever found. The boys of the old brigade are remembered fondly, but I might see them once a year if things go well, and there have been years where I don’t at all.
I haven’t really built that kind of crew since, although passing through three jobs might have more than a little to do with that. I think it was lightning in a beer bottle that the EUS came together in the first place – a bunch of guys (mostly) of similar age, thrown together by chance and forged by adversity into a band of brothers. Those circumstances have not obtained here, for better or worse – they might have at my first job if not for a certain amount of internal strife and one or two toxifying personalities. Subsequent jobs have lacked the requisite numbers, demographics, and conditions that would forge the same type of bond, which has been unhelpful when some of the old challenges the EUS faced reassert themselves in the new world. On the other hand, having friends and acquaintances outside work means that I can complain to people who aren’t living the exact problem I’m bitching about.
I left DC at the top of my game, after an MVP-type year and the final welling-up of my black cloud of rage and despair. I put it on the line – change, or I walk – and I walked as promised. Given the number of job changes in California, I have struggled to get back to that point. My job, when I left DC, was to be Winston Wolf – the guy my boss could call in just about any situation, send me to fix it, and the people at the other end would say “The HICK? Shit, that’s all you had to say!” And one of the reasons I reached a frustration point in my first job here was because that was plainly never going to happen – I was in a role where I was merely bundling up work for other people to do. All I could do myself was come up with numbers and beg other guys to fill the orders, and in the meantime try not to blow out my knee hoisting boxes and wrangling pallets. Obviously, in my second job, a pair of conjoined part-time support tasks wasn’t going to make a hero out of me – especially in an environment where the computing was three or four years behind state-of-the-art on the desktop. (Hell, by the end of 2008, the majority of computers I supported were still running OS X 10.4.)
When I took my current job, my plan was this: year one, rookie of the year. Year two, valued contributor. Year three, MVP. Year four, The Wolf. This plan, such as it is, is the main reason I haven’t completely lost my shit over the past couple of months, as climbing call totals and reduced manpower combine to make things more like DC than ever before. If I want to be MVP – and to really be The Wolf – I can’t just be working on Mac software fixes. I have to be swapping hard drives, killing off PC malware infestations, resurrecting group printer-copiers, doing remote fixes from memory without the luxury of a screen in front of me (let alone Remote Desktop), and generally taking the calls that nobody else wants to be on the hook for. In fact, my recent conversation with the boss played directly into that – I need management to stop using “number of calls closed” as a metric, or all those times I take on a tar-pit of a ticket and spend all day wrestling it into control will get the same amount of credit as doing one “have you tried turning it off and on again” and spending the remaining seven hours fifty-five minutes engrossed in Farmville.
The fact that I feel I need to be The Wolf again speaks volumes to the fact that work is still a defining part of who I am. I didn’t want it to be like that, but the other things I’ve done haven’t panned out the way I expected. Friends have gotten married, changed jobs, moved away, or simply not been made. Things like RCIA, or barbershop quartet singing, or watching English soccer, or adult Bible study/theology class have all gone by the boards for one reason or another. I know I need hobbies, or at least pastimes. I read more than I have in a while, thanks to the Kindle and the enforcement of Tuesday nights as “unplug the computer” night. I’m far more involved in Vanderbilt athletics than at any point since I left Nashville, thanks to Anchor of Gold and the National Commodore Club (as well as having access to ESPN3.com). We still have Cal tickets during football season, though for how much longer no one can say. And the commentary scene at Every Day Should Be Saturday has become its own little proto-social sphere, enough like the Friends Zone of old that I find myself muttering “all of this has happened before…” like some kind of Cylon hybrid.
I do travel more. When I lived in DC, most trips were to New York, Ohio or California, aside from the obligatory visits to the ancestral lands. Now I’ve been to Portland twice, Seattle once, Disneyland three times since October 2009, San Diego, Reno/Tahoe, Las Vegas, the Gold Country, New Orleans twice, and – most significantly – three trips to London with excursions to the Cotswolds, Bath (twice), York, Scotland, Switzerland, Paris (twice), Austria and Germany. And I’ve come to the realization that I really do want to travel more – which brings up the problem of having the money and the vacation to facilitate it, not to mention the trauma of long-haul air travel.
My fashion sense – such as it is – has changed. The days of leather jackets in winter, khakis in summer, and “black shirt, black shirt, black shirt, Hawaiian shirt, black shirt, Hawaiian shirt, black Hawaiian shirt” have given way – first to T-shirts and dirty jeans and steel-toes, then to a slightly cleaner version of same, to a (very) brief experiment in trying to look stylish (Lucky Brand jeans, untucked dress shirts, Saboteur jacket, oxblood cap-toed Docs), to a Gabriel Hounds-Cayce Pollard approach to fashion. At present, if I had to put a label on it, I would say my look is “what I wore in high school, updated to what I would have thought twenty-five years in the future looked like from 1988”. The old Reebok Phase I tennis shoes have given way to New Balance 992s or Palladium Pampas LITE boots, the Members Only jackets have been replaced by black rain shells, and the assorted pastel short-sleeve Madras button-ups of yore have yielded to solid-color sport shirts selected on the basis of whatever the Eddie Bauer outlet had in size XLT during a 30% off sale.
I also need to worry about my health. I’m paying more attention to my diet than ever before, I’m getting in more walking than I ever did at any job since I gave up the Metro commute, I smoke maybe four cigars a year tops, I’ve even given up regular soda altogether – and yet my cholesterol numbers stay just a little too high and my resting heart rate is still not what it was in DC. Aging sucks, and it’s hard to shake the sense that I’m now running to stand still. And believe me, “running” is literally necessary now, even if I don’t do it nearly enough.
So where are we?
When I left DC, it was because I needed another fresh start. I was thirty-two years old, and even if you accept the fairly risible premise that 30 is the new 20, it was still a situation where I wasn’t going to get a whole lot of opportunities for fresh starts. Now I’m pushing 40 – or at the very least, dragging 30 like a mug – and where am I?
Not in need of a fresh start, at least. After a couple of blown decisions, and the mental and spiritual consequences of same, I find myself back in a job with pay and benefits commensurate with what I had in DC, and stress levels that while currently pegging the whuck-o-meter are still way below the darkest days of 2003 – or of 2007. I don’t have the kind of tight-knit crew I had in DC, but I know a lot more people to speak to and socialize with in a slightly broader sphere than just work. Hell, I have a social sphere that extends beyond work, which I don’t think I ever really developed in DC beyond the seven members of Team Ploughboy and the Zoners that occasionally guest-starred – and the breadth and depth means there’s always something going on somewhere.
In the end, I guess that explains a lot. DC was seven years of stability that ultimately culminated in turbulence and strife. SIlicon Valley has been seven years of turbulence and strife culminating in stability (notwithstanding the 2006 “I finally got my dull moment” year). And I do feel that sense of routinization, as I walk around the bed to pull out my contacts and flip off the light – or wake up knowing that I need to brush my teeth, be dressed, down my morning smoothie and walk out the door by this exact time if I’m going to catch the light rail on time.
I have heard parents remark about the experience of child-rearing “the days are slow but the years are fast.” To be honest, right now, the days aren’t as slow as they may seem – and the years are faster than I can register. It doesn’t feel like two and a half years at my current job. It didn’t feel like three years at my first Valley job when I left. And it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it’s been seven years since we crossed the Bay Bridge for good.