With my final day at Dynamic Graphics coming up the next morning, the charmed life I’ve lived came through at the eleventh hour!
A little rewind to provide context.
After a long weekend in Milwaukee to celebrate Helen’s birthday, I realized how much I missed living in a real city, a metropolis, not a one-major-employer dump. It didn’t help that all the friends I had and made recently had moved away over the last year. So I got rather lost in thought on the drive home from my college-era home figuring how to rectify my sorrows by returning to Milwaukee come hell or high water.
Then Doc changed my mind to come to Austin and I sent him my resume for his proposal to be his IT-Marketing helper at University Towers. That was around Halloween 1993.
The brutal Winter of 1993-94 didn’t help. It was damn cold and some of you may recall, ATM machines were out of service for a couple days through the Midwest and Northeast due to a particular heavy snowfall knocking out the data lines. I soldiered on, hoping against dread that I would be basking in the warmer Austin weather eventually.
By the new year, something had to give. I remember this detail very clearly. On January 6, 1994; many employees at DG were asked to edit their current job descriptions. Mine was doing external tech support for DG customers who purchased their various computer-based clip art. In short, my days entailed explaining to people how to ungroup the vectored pieces in Adobe Illustrator, Aldus FreeHand or Corel Draw. If I were a car mechanic, I spent my time supporting the pine-tree shaped air freshener people hung over the rearview mirror. Anyway, the current listing from HR said my position required a college diploma. I immediately re-wrote it to say a high school degree with a year of related experience. I turned it in along with my two weeks.
The clock was ticking and the schadenfreude began brewing with certain assholes in my life too (both work and cretins at Adventureland). To add insult to injury, I was due to show up in court regarding the TSR v. Gygax & GDW lawsuit later in the month. I didn’t really have a Plan B. I just couldn’t stand my situation any longer. If Austin was delayed or fell through, I thought about temping around Bloomington-Normal. Sponging off my grandmother wasn’t a consideration, including her footing the bill to earn a second degree through her alma mater Illinois State University.
Now it was Wednesday night, I had endured my second-to-last day with DG and went right to my weekly RoleMaster game, hoping to enjoy some gaming with Bloomington-Normal’s more tolerable residents. When I got home, Grandma was all a tizzy about a phone call she received from somebody in Texas named Lee (Doc’s real name). He wanted me to call him back. It wasn’t too late in the evening as I did. The Austin arrangement was a done deal! How soon would I be there. I had to tell him two weeks thanks to the court date followed up with packing my things to be shipped down there. I decided to use a rental car as well, U-Haul was outrageous. We were set.
Part two tomorrow, the kiss off.