One in a series.
This entry starts on Dec. 2, 1997. On that day, I left the newspaper business, having burned out from having to do more with less and with no possible prospects for either advancement or the benefits of full-time work, including health insurance.
Two days later, I went to a former iron smelting building on the shores of the Delaware River to take a swing dancing lesson.
The events of that first week in 1997 represent a duality when it comes to how I view 1998. It was, at the same time, the worst year of my life and also the best.
In May of that year, I chose to move out of a place where I had spent two decades to seek my fortune in the big city. I had a master’s degree that I wasn’t using and I wasn’t getting any younger.
I moved down with clothes, my computer, my life savings, and hope.
But as I would learn, I didn’t have a great plan or any clue whatsoever of how I was going to get to where I wanted.
As my job search lurched, I was able to find some comfort swing dancing. I managed to luck into a person who was in the World Swing Dance Council Hall of Fame who was teaching in a small tavern southwest of town.
In addition, I started work in September 1998 on the Geocities web presence which eventually became this website.
As I think about it today, it is remarkable how lucky I was able to find good story material so quickly. The first game I saw, I encountered a sophomore center midfielder who would feature in the senior women’s national team pool as an alternate during the mid-2000s. The second game, I encountered a coach who would become this site’s national field hockey coach of the year for her efforts in the postseason. The third, I encountered a player who would become an Ivy League two-sport star on a bandbox of a field near Washington National Cathedral. The fourth, I ran into a driven coach who would help her team set what was then a national record for consecutive state championships.
Eventually, my attention turned to trying to find a good full-time job. I still had a series of ideals when it came to where I wanted to work, including a series of think tanks whose work I had grown to admire while in college and graduate school.
It was, however, in late 1998 when I started a series of odd jobs through a headhunting agency in the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. I was asked to man a call center for a lobbying organization for trial lawyers, I worked a month as an office manager for a non-profit that worked with special-needs kids, and even got a short stint for one of the major accounting firms.
My most successful stint was with the legal department of an import firm based in the Georgetown section of the city. The firm was put together similar to how WorldCom was assembled, as a so-called “roll-up” of many different small firms in order to create one large efficient firm.
I learned a lot of lessons from being in that business environment, and I absorbed them very quickly. I learned about the duplication of effort and turf battles, about being punctual and respectful, and I learned a lot about the financial world that you wouldn’t ever learn in business school.
One of the directors called me a credit to the organization, which was a pretty good compliment to hear as someone who was out of a job a year before.
The benefits were pretty awesome. I really liked lower Georgetown, with its collection of whimsical independent shops that reminded me so much of Cambridge. It was also pretty cool to have space on weekends in the parking garage.
But like WorldCom before it, this firm went belly-up only about a year after I was hired full-time.
The timing of my departure was actually propitious; two days after signing the papers for my severance, I was in my Volvo in the way down to Tennessee as my parents had decided to take a month’s break to vacation in the small college town where my father had gotten his theology degrees.
After we all got back from Tennessee, however, it was time to look for work again.
