I randomly looked at GooMaps last night to see if my loverly old Ninja was still visible in the Cubelandia parking lot. Yes. Yes it is. See the red arrow.

I parked in that spot for most of my tenure at that place, which was going on 13 years. I am going on 15 years as an employee, a fact that astounds me and astounded my boss when we veered off on a tangent during a meeting yesterday. When people ask me how I ended up at this job I always say something like “totally by accident”. That’s not exactly true but a series of sorta random decisions on my part plus some serendipity and a bit of hard work led to it.

The beginning was one day when me and UKW got done with one more swim and kayak ride at the moomincabin, had tea with our mooms, and drove down to the Planet Ann Arbor where she and the GG went out to eat and I went to my first class of the current semester at the community college I had been attending for a couple years. In the Internet Professional program.

It was a “capstone” class and somewhat to my dismay, we were told that we would be assigned to various area companies as interns. I wasn’t sure I wanted that. At the end of the class, the prof gave me the dreaded “see me” thing. The deal was, he had assigned me (alone) to a company that wanted to PAY its interns. It was like $12/hour and I had to interview and I was TERRIFIED but I sucked it up and the LSCHP hired me.

Toward the end of the three month term of my internship… You guessed it. They approached me with a full-time job offer. Oh man. Do I want this? We could certainly use the money but we weren’t poor and I loved my lifestyle of gallivanting up to the moomincabin, etc., whenever I wanted to. Plus, The Commander was not getting any younger and my dad and brother were dead. Could I handle her declining years from a five hour drive away working a full-time job?

In the end money talks pretty loud and here I am… It wasn’t easy the last year of The Comm’s life but my boss greatly valued family and understood my difficult situation and gave me a LOT of leeway, knowing by then that I would do what I could throughout and pick up where I left off after it was all over. (I also had a LOT of help from the GG and some of my cousins.)

This is what our parking lot looked like on a day when most people were working in person so you can probably tell a couple of things. 1) Why I could park in the same place every day. 2) Why our company switched our entire local work force to permanent telecommuters and closed the building a bit after covid hit. Back in the day, a coveted perk at the headquarters (in another state) was a parking spot close to the building. Once, one of our local folks won that perk. And laughed about it since we never had a problem finding parking spaces.

So that’s my loverly old vee-hickle there and there are likely no vee-hickles in that lot nowadays because our end of the building is empty.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 31st, 2022 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.