Changing Careers from Clergy to Computers
Riding the roller coaster
Life was bright and fun for the first two months of my career change. My wife and I were both working, starting to repay some of the many debts we'd built up during our years in school and my years in the ministry. We were having fun and planning for a future which we would choose.
In early October of 1998, I took my wife to the hospital emergency room and we discovered that her nausea was actually morning sickness. Sure, we'd known about the pregnancy for a week, and we'd feared that morning sickness would be bad. We just didn't know how bad. After a few days in the hospital, my wife no longer had a job. Nor could she work at one anyway--she was bedridden for a total of 9 weeks and went to the hospital a total of 4 times. Suddenly I was our sole source of income, and my entry-level tech support job just didn't pay enough.
And then I realized that my entry-level tech support job might not last as long as I hoped. I had vague thoughts of staying at Futurist for the duration of my Unix class, and then I'd see what happened. If Futurist offered me a better position, I'd take it. If someone else offered me a better job, I'd take that. But that was a year away. Or so I thought.
Futurist hits the rocks
In early October, the company's future was bright. We were selling more and more computers, hiring more techs to support them and new supervisors to keep the show running. For the most part, our techs worked well together and got along nicely.
My own career was picking up speed too. I became our chief liason with the home shopping network's customer service department, and every day would go down the street to meet with the customer service supervisor to discuss the cases of customers who had problems but called the home shopping network instead of us. I'd take those cases and resolve them. I got the more difficult cases too, customers who were difficult to satisfy, and handled them too. My own supervisor counted on me more and more to keep things running smoothly in our department. I was doing useful work and having fun.
Yet the grand claims I'd heard about the company's future were looking more and more questionable as the weeks went by. Dark signs kept piling up day after day. The company rented an old machine shop to use as a warehouse, constuction site, shipping and repair center. Those departments moved out of the building, leaving just sales and support. Suddenly the office was much quieter. This was to be a good thing. Yet we wondered. As techs, part of our job was to diagnose computer problems and send out repair parts, if necessary. Part of the company's sales pitch was that we'd also send out onsite technicians if needed, no matter where in the country a customer lived. We contracted local computer service companies to help.
On the front lines, we thought all was working normally. Then we started getting complaints from customers that parts weren't arriving, that technicians weren't coming to help. It turned out that new shipping manager wasn't shipping partshe didn't feel were necessary. One or two technicans weren't going to help customers because Futurist wasn't paying them. It was hard to believe. The company was selling thousands of computers per month, we were told. Maybe a payment or two had been lost or forgotten, that's all.
In mid-October, our database crashed. That doesn't sound like a major problem, does it? Yet we kept all our customer information, all our customer history in that database. It was simply a Microsoft Access database, and apparently it couldn't handle the load we were giving it. We were told to wait an hour while the database was restored from backup.
After an hour, the news was grim. Our "network administrator" hadn't backed up our machines in 3 weeks. That was an eternity, given the volume of calls we were taking. In my book, neglecting backups for three weeks is a firing offense. Instead, our "network administrator" was given the job of writing a new database. Again, hard to believe. But it was true! We'd looked at some professionally written customer service databases--we needed one which wouldn't crash again. Yet the "network administrator" convinced company officials that he could write a perfectly good database using Visual Basic. In the meantime, we were told to start using pen and paper to keep track of customer information. We had to write down and fax our shipping requests to the warehouse across town, and often those requests were challenged or ignored. And the customer complaints continued to grow. Computers weren't being shipped, though credit cards had been charged. Computers were broken on arrival. The wrong computers were shipped. Repair parts and technicians weren't being sent either. And one day we heard that even though we were selling thousands of computers per month, we had a huge return rate. One day while discussing the situation with another supervisor, I realized that Futurist might not have much of a future.
That supervisor got me started job hunting again. He mentioned a job fair which was to be held at a local company and suggested that I go. He had worked for the company earlier and loved it. I got his help in bringing my resume up to date and started searching the classified ads again.
Renewed job hunting
The job fair was my first experience with a large corporation, and it wasn't unpleasant at all. When I expressed my interest in working with Unix, I got a preliminary interview with a junior-level Unix administrator. He didn't expect a lot, I could tell, but he liked my attitude and eagerness to learn. He scheduled me an interview with his department head. On the same evening I had a preliminary interview for a help desk position as well, and soon had a second interview for that too.
Unfortunately, the interviews didn't lead to jobs. Although I had some technical knowledge, good people skills and proven ability to learn, I still didn't have work experience. That's the classic problem: you need work experience to get a job, but a job to get work experience. When first changing careers, you may often have to take any job offered to you in your new field just to get a foot in the door. However, in computers you can move up quickly. And I had to move up quickly. The baby was coming in June, and my wife wouldn't be going back to work, if she even could work that long after morning sickness went away. I had to find a job which would support us all and I had to do it by June of 1999.
As the fall progressed and my company's future looked bleaker, I worked harder and harder to find another job. I searched the newspaper and the internet, followed job leads from friends and went to job fairs. I distributed 2 dozen resumes a week at minimum. I had two or three interviews every week. Yet none of them led to a job offer.
Accelerating downhill
As the days went on, life at Futurist became more and more surreal. One day we couldn't get copier supplies because the bills hadn't been paid. A week later we couldn't get toilet paper and hand towels for the bathrooms because the bills hadn't been paid. One of my technicians had given up on waiting for a new database and written his own Access database just to keep up with his own customers. Several of the repair technicians wrote a web-based database which ran on a Linux system, worked over the network between our two locations, and was very fast and versatile. Yet we were told not to use it because the "network administrator's" database would do the job.
Customer complaints kept building. We were receiving hundreds of voicemails per day and overnight because we had too few technicians to answer the phones. We had too few to return the calls, for that matter. Soon we learned that we weren't even able to get new parts for new computers, and onsite technicians were quitting left and right. Customers were sending computers in for repair, and not getting their machines back. Others were ordering custom-built computers, paying by check and credit card, and weren't getting their machines at all. We in tech support were able to take calls, but weren't able to do anything to help customers. Sales staff were leaving or were told to leave. The construction line was idle. Shipping was at a standstill. Whenever we were paid, we rushed to the bank to deposit our checks, hoping that the money would be there to cover them. By late October I had told all my techs that they were fools if they weren't looking for jobs. Now by mid-November it was clear to all of us that only a miracle could save the company.
At the end of November my supervisor was sick for a few days. During that time the really dark rumors started floating around. Apparently the new warehouse was due to be torn down within a few months; why had most of our operation been moved there? Word was out that unless some big money came in by December 14, our doors would be closed.
When my supervisor came back at the beginning of December, she asked me what had been going on in the company. I told her and watched her turn pale. She immediately went to the vice president and asked him about the rumors. He told her that the closing date wasn't December 14. It was December 4, the next day. Our days were numbered, and the number was 1.
A savior?
Late on our last day of work, we were told that another company had stepped forward to buy us out and we would keep our jobs. We had our doubts. Why would someone want to buy a sinking ship?
As December wore on, we found out that (as usual) the bright picture painted for us didn't quite reflect reality. Our new owners, Ion Technologies, didn't guarantee all our jobs but promptly got rid of all departments except customer service and tech support. Over the course of four months I'd seen our company go from around 75 people down to 10. We wondered what Ion was up to, but didn't care as long as we could hold on for a few more weeks.
It turned out that Ion Technologies had hoped to take over selling computers where Futurist had been selling them. The new owners (as we called them) saw the huge money to be made in home shopping, and wanted to exploit the customer base Futurist had already developed. Or something like that. We just knew that we were going to keep our jobs for a while more, and Ion had promised to pick up the pieces. They even promised to send out better computers.
However, it was hard to take over Futurist's customer base without any customer records. A few days after the takeover, Futurist's former president refused to give Ion any of the customer information he had, and kicked us all out of the building. We Futurist refugees stood out in the cold in mid-December without a place to work. Ion's leadership claimed to need us, and found us space to work at the headquarters of the home shopping network, just down the road. For once, things started looking up.
But not for long. It turned out that our jobs working for Ion was to try to help customers with problems, yet we didn't have computers, parts or technicians. We were to tell customers to send back their defective computers, and they would receive new computers within two weeks. And it didn't happen. As Christmas approached, customers were demanding their new Ion computers, or even their old and allegedly-repaired Futurist computers. We were told to tell them to wait another two weeks. A number of Christmas surprises were ruined.
That happened to us too. Futurist went away and took our last paychecks with it. Ion simply didn't seem to want to pay us at all. When we finally convinced them that we needed to be paid after going 3 weeks without, they told us that we had to take a 20% pay cut to cover their expenses. If we thought that work couldn't be worse than it had become at Futurist, we were wrong. Ion was worse. We were to lie to customers and promise them computers we knew they'd never get, and do it for 20% less than we'd been receiving. To top it all off, the job market seemed to be drying up as the end of the year approached. We knew that Ion's days were numbered. And other computer jobs were going away.
Bright spots
Looking back, it seems like it was a dreary Fall. My wife was constantly bedridden and/or in the hospital. I was constantly running back and forth to work, class and job interviews, and doctor appointments, of course. Money was drying up. Then in mid-December, morning sickness suddenly went away. I had my wife back. She was even able to start working around Christmas. Late in the year, I had my first really positive job interviews, but again no offers.
The end (of this job)
After Christmas, morale was at its lowest point yet, and that was pretty low. If we went to work, we went to work. If we quit, we quit. No one cared. The new owners barely seemed to care. One or two would come by once a day to see if we were still there. Once they made vague promises about technical training and benefits. No one believed them. One tech said that we were all like refugees with no hope for the future. In many ways he was right.
Early in January, 1999, we got word that Ion had failed to negotiate a contract with the home shopping network. Once again our jobs were questionable, and no one cared anymore. We made a proposal to work independently for the network, repairing computers for them, but were turned down. We were offered customer service jobs there, but no one was interested. We went home. Nothing more was to be done, except come back on Friday for our paychecks.
There I was, out of a job and without any good prospects. Even on our last payday, Ion gave us the runaround. They didn't want to pay us. We waited 8 hours at the shopping network headquarters, confident that they wouldn't pay us at all. Ion leadership finally showed up at 5, gave us the usual 20% pay cut, and then tried to tell us that we'd be legally obligated to help them when they sued the shopping channel for breach of contract. I'm sure that we all laughed inside. I took my check and left.
But I was no longer out of a job! One of my late-December interviews had turned into a second interview. On our last day working for Ion, I checked my answering machine and found a message about a job offer. I immediately called back, and was offered an internal help desk job at a small company called DCA. I'd be earning what I'd been earning before the 20% pay cut. I was no fool. I took the job and offered to start after the weekend.
Lessons from the Futurist experience
The Futurist days were rough for all of us. Yet I suppose that they provided some important lessons. First, no matter how much you like your job, don't be blind. If your company is sinking, it's sinking. There's no glory in going down with it. Second, keep your resume up to date. You never know when you're going to need it. I like my current job and don't even look at others, but I still keep my resume up to date. And third, even bad experiences can lead to good things. The fall of Futurist was a bad experience for all of us, but it led me to much better jobs.
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