Twenty years ago, I look back with utmost horror regarding the rather desperate and impulsive decision I made that day. Sometime before lunch I turned in my two weeks at Dynamic Graphics (DG). I had nothing to fall back on whatsoever. OK, nothing solid.
Austin was foggy and lacked a guarantee. I had also been talking to a temp agency around Bloomington-Normal to at least cut out the soul-crushing commute to Peoria. School wasn’t something I considered yet I should’ve. I did pay off the money I owed Illinois State (ISU) plus I would’ve earned a second degree pretty rapidly thanks to all those stupid humanities Marquette made me take.
What led up to this though?
As the cliché goes, it was the perfect storm involving seeing my friends in Chicago and not getting to enjoy the annual Silder New Year’s Eve bash properly (I had to be at my other part-time job by 6 PM on 1/1/94). Plus Christmas totally sucked on every level, emphasis on the weather. I bet many of you don’t remember the snow storm that went down around then. It knocked out thousands of ATMs in the East and Midwest.
So for some inane reason, the morons running DG into the toilet asked all of us review our current job descriptions. If there were things we felt were inaccurate, missing, blah blah; feel free to modify it for HR.
At DG I was the External Tech Support person. In English, I was the dude who answered the 800 number DG had for its customers when they had tech questions about the clip art. More often it was giving basic support to Adobe, QuarkXpress, Aldus and Corel users too lazy to read the manual for the art software DG’s stuff worked best with. The closest parallel I remembered was this: DG made the pine-tree-shaped air freshener people put in their cars yet we fielded the calls on how to drive. Initially this was a sweet gig. It grew old quickly but a hostile, territorial co-worker named Celli was who made it unbearable. After I saw my friend/co-worker Rad co-lead a minor revolt against our mutual boss over the department’s reviews being tardy for as much as a year (no review, no raise), I saw the writing on the wall. DG was slowly circling the toilet. The powers that be were not just against my BBS idea (a precursor to a Web page), they didn’t see what was happening through AOL as relevant. I think most were trying to get to retirement and bail.
Therefore, I lowered the education level needed (BA/BS, really?) to high-school graduate with a year of related experience. Turned it in and see here’s my two weeks too. I’m overqualified (bored) to be doing this.
The gossipy Reneé from copywriting called my extension in 10 minutes. Small wonder our carpooling last Summer was a bust.
The next two weeks were quite a mix of relief and stress. Thankfully, relief won out at the 11th hour, making my last day awesome.
Sadly, I wasn’t done with Peoria yet. An egomaniac named E. Gary Gygax was the primary culprit in making me return one final time.