My life is a series of parallels.
I picked up a saxophone at age 11. Which led to a music major. Which led to a combination of burnout, disillusionment with making a living in music (professional musicians wear Keds), and the desire to spend evenings with my wife & family. Today I pick my sax up every 3 months and play LOUDLY in my basement, and then whisper to myself “you still got it”.
I met Jenny in Drivers Ed. Yes, in the car. I just like to say “I met my wife in the backseat of a car”.
I got my first job at a convenience store selling beer to my friends in high school and eating the donuts while boss wasn’t looking. One day the boss was looking. Canned.
Back to college. The burnout caused me to switch degree emphasis from performance to composition, which had three unintended effects: I learned piano, I got a tech support job tutoring students on how to use music software, and a few new musician friends introduced me to a church unlike church (no liturgy; no plate-passing; interesting, sensible, relevant sermons; Bible; reason; scholarship)
The piano resulted in more gigs than I ever got on saxophone (weddings, restaurants, churches, fashion shows, parties). I still play everyday, mostly because it’s soft (contrast with LOUDLY above) and it’s convenient – there’s one in my living room. Oh, and piano = no assembly required (unlike saxophone).
Rewind back to college (I warned you: parallels) where I’m teaching kids Finale. They ask me MS Office questions. That’s outside of my job description and expertise, but before long I can answer them, along with questions about operating systems, networking, and Napster.
I land an end-user IT support job with a local small business teaching vets how to use tablet PCs and our software. One day I get tasked with an HTML find-and-replace project and a few months later I’m the unofficial web guy. Continuing to follow the white rabbit led me to programming languages, databases, and the realization that my liking web development felt a lot like my liking math. I also got accepted into a one-year mens program (aka “the program”) through DBC that met from 6-8am daily (essentially a biblical boot camp). Easily one of my favorite years.
I graduate with my music degree, get married, and land my first dedicated web developer role (polishing miles of spaghetti code for a real estate inspection services company in Dallas). After finishing the program, I enroll at DTS. I do the change-degree-emphasis thing again, and – as a bonus – I move the family from from Denton, TX to Vail, CO while still enrolled in graduate school. This allows me to squeeze a two-year degree into six years.
We spent three years in Vail. I worked for a local interactive agency building websites for ski resorts. Then I realized that my profession afforded me the unique opportunity to work anywhere, but live and play in Vail. So I traded one job for jobs all over the nation. When the jobs became smaller and more frequent (i.e. when W2′s become 1099′s and you ask your accountant “what do you mean ’15% self-employment tax?!?’”) I found a handle on self-employment, and eventually got bitten by the entrepreneur bug.
Which brings us to today – still live in the Rockies and the Lord has blessed us with three beautiful daughters. Life is good, no complaints (except when it snows in May).
