Thinking About my Life and MS - Era 4 - 1985 to 2000

This was the era of my first marriage.   It was not a terrible era nor was it a great era.  It just was.  There were some good times but there was also a lot of bickering unhappiness.  Both of our families were messed up and though mine was the more obvious hers was as bad but in a more insidious manner.

I had left the small consulting firm to go to work for Booz Allen prior to getting married and worked there for two years.  It was a formative experience.  Taught me a lot about PowerPoint, politics, and polishing prose for paying or prospective clients.   After a couple years there I moved on to a small consulting group in Baltimore.  We bought a house in Columbia smack dab between Baltimore and Washington DC.

I bought a small boat and then later a C&C 32 that we kept in Annapolis at Annapolis Landing Marina.  This will become important later!

I got a job with Black & Decker as a Director of Application Development working for a guy that I had doubts about during the interview process but joined his team anyway.  Turns out that we just could not communicate.  I thought it was me for a while.  Then other people joined the organization and it turns out the guy was pretty much bonkers.  Felt a little slow in that it took me so long to come to that conclusion.  In any case I was on the road to being fired when some reorganizations happened under the power of a new leader for Information Technology, Logistics, Distribution, and Transportation.

This was the beginning of some interesting times as I moved into a role serving as Director of Technology reporting to the VP of Technology and Operations whot reported to the leader that I mention above.   This is harder to write than it should be given that I am leaving out names so I am going to cut right to the chase...I survived a number of trying professional ordeals and saw a lot of changes in the management team at all levels ultimately including the top guy.  He left to teach at a very prestigious University in the Washington Metro Area.   For some reason he is not teaching anything to do with Information Technology, Logistics, Distribution, and Transportation (luckily for the students).

At home things were ok but certainly not great.  My wife at the time and I did not have knock down drag out fights but we did spend an inordinate amount of time spitting nails at each other.   We both had family issues and we both found spending time with our respective families to be difficult.   Without going into the gory details I would summarize by saying that we simply did not make each other happy and in fact we seemed to do just the opposite.