Dateline: 2015-16. There is a hot dog cart in the heart of downtown Winston Salem. The owner is a big black guy in his 50s. I started buying doggies from him every few days, not because I dig dogs (yuk) but because I enjoyed talking to him so much. When he wasn't busy, he would sit with me & talk about his life, about being a small business owner, about life & racial relations in the south. Fascinating stuff, at least to me, being a 'Yankee.' One time there was a line of several folks. I decided right then & there to make a Facebook page for his business whilst I waited. Which I did. I showed him 15 minutes later, and he was fascinated how I could do that, and that I actually did do it for him.
I never told him my one doggie joke out of respect:
Q: Why should you never boil hot dogs?
A: Because it washes away the nutrients.
Let's focus. Next to the hot dog stand a scruffy hippie type I nicknamed 'bongo man' would bang away on bongos during midday. And sing. Loudly. Badly. He did that most summer days. I once went over to talk to him, just to see what his deal was. Coherent answers were not to be. Well, I tried. He looks exactly like this, say hi if you see him:
Let's focus. So, you've been wondering where I moved to upon fleeing The House of Tantrum? Two Airbnb then a student summer rental. That 1st place I grabbed as it was available same day & I was in a bind, technically homeless. It wasn't a house or apartment. It was a converted auto body shop or some kind of warehouse. Giant garage door opened to the cement living room. It was much larger than a house. Essentially a big atrium with a couple bedrooms off the main room. My bedroom had sliding glass patio door, painted entirely white, mattress on floor, and the only room with AC. The owner was ex-military, wouldn't talk about it. He was skinny but clearly strong & wiry. For example, at the top of the atrium were windows & rafters. Way up high, like 20 feet. One day something up there needed fixing & I watched him scale a ladder up then move around like a spider up in the steel rafters. Cement floor, long way down. His ladyfriend lived there, and she had nasty bronchitis, which I promptly caught. That sucked hugely. I recall buying bags of ice whenever I went out, as it was insanely hot in there. Their kitchen had tall west windows, no drapes, it was oven hot in the kitchen, just insane.
Speaking of, a short block away was an actual car repair shop owned by older black guy. We chatted, he ordered me a new distributor or whatever it was on the AC that broke. I told him I was a tech guy, and he recruited me to fix his ancient windows desktop. So for a lengthy afternoon, I sat in his filthy chair, at his desk piled high with papers, literally pouring sweat, and cleaned up his computer from all the malware & crapware infesting it. But the funny part, to me, was thus: it was a black owned business with 100% black customers. All of whom, upon entering, walked up to me and started telling me about their car problems.
It was a real knee slapper.
Let's focus. The AC part took over a week to arrive, first world problems. But remember: I'm an Eskimo. In NC. In summer. The summer heat there is not just freakish, it seemed dangerous. My 2nd & final summer there I was more used to it, but my 1st summer there I spent in seclusion. I would come outside in the evenings for bike rides, sometimes during day on weekends. Sweet jebus, the humidity. The sun is fierce, then the humidity, quite truly dangerous if not careful.
I lasted in the warehouse place 10 days. It was so sweltering upon exiting my bedroom I had to split. Found a nearby place, a 2 bedroom apt, a guy rented out the spare. Stayed there 18 days. Nice guy, a young lawyer. He watched Bachelorette w/his ladyfriend, apparently nightly. First time I ever saw that show (and last). Ridiculous show. He had a small yapper dog also. Nbd, but he had a picture of the dog next to his bed, a formal portrait pic, which I could see from kitchen. Weird? Could be worse. And he had AC. And no drama.
The next & final short term rental had, wait for it, weird shit happen there. I was there for 2 months. A converted tobacco warehouse. They're all over dt Winston. 100 years ago they stored massive bales of tobacco. Now they're funky lofts. Hardwood floors, brick walls, high ceilings. Pretty groovy actually. Actually, 100 years ago, Winston was the wealthiest city in all the USA, I was told repeatedly by the locals, as tobacco money flowed like the river.
So, the weird shite. Two med students lived there and split for the summer. Well, the guy I talked to split, the other stayed another couple week. The tenant I met with, nice guy, had me sign a homemade lease: pay me $1k/month, don't break anything, etc. And he warned me, the walls are paper thin. In my/his bedroom, if someone was talking in the adjacent unit, it literally sounded like they were inside the room. How anyone could live there is beyond me. The other med student who stayed there, wait for it, was a med student who had classes taught by the verbally abusive nightmare surgeon I initially moved in with, see Part 1. This is a town of 100k. Hundreds of lofts & apartments. Thousands of units. Hundreds of doctors, no? Hell the building I was in had 4 stories, dozens of units. And of course, the tenant there was connected to the bitchiest of the bitches. I didn't mention to him, didn't connect those dots. But wtf. He split after a couple weeks to his parents or whatnot.
Then they found Michael to take his place and join me for a month or two there. No idea how they found Michael or why he was there, he was always vague on any life details. But he stayed with me for a couple months. He was my age, white guy. Did not have his life shit together. I always assumed he was going through divorce, or recently paroled. Didn't ask; didn't matter to me. He hung out at a nearby bar, and often brought the oversized local ladies back for a sleepover. But he was helpful to me when I needed help moving out of there into my more permanent space & generally a decent guy.
So you've been wondering, how was I making the fat stacks whilst bouncing the nomad life? Glad you asked. By doing mini mobile survey projects. I had access to nice diy survey platform with built in cool reporting. Access to the people connected to the surveys. I did the programming & report dashboards myself, it's easy once I learned the platform. I did it all solo for that matter. I did a bunch of networking and found the leader of a project management team in the consumer research space. Told her I was an expert in running mobile, nimble surveys, which was true. She connected me to her team, and I ran several gigs for them. They took me about a week, I charged $3k for them, worked nicely.
Until I met Jeff. He was on the team of PMs. Jeff wanted to run a gig with me. His client was a big insurance company, Liberty Mutual, I think. Sounds great, right? But from the 1st call, Jeff was peppering me with technical questions well outside the scope of the platform. What if we did this? Can it do that? On & on. I had been running gigs for his teammates, in a specific framework, and they went swimmingly. I knew this guy's obsession with stretching his $3k into a $50k project wouldn't work. How could it? But he was adamant. And I should have just walked away. But I told him, possibly it's doable; you'll have to do the heavy number crunching offline on your end.
And, I could have pulled it off. Except for one stupefyingly bad decision, that I agreed to. Made an assumption the software, specifically the customer list, could stay consistent with live recruiting. Basically we launched this prematurely. We had a couple hundred or so customers to send surveys to. Needed a hundred more. Should have waited. But Jeff agreed to deliver data on a certain date, they were still recruiting, yadda. My hope, or assumption, was that as I sent out the surveys to the new folks every day, their results would be appended to the end of the data set. Turns out, that wasn't the case. I figured that out a few days in, when I started doing QA checks, then more & more. The shit wasn't lining up.
For an hour or two I sort of debated in my head not telling Jeff. In one sense, he'd probably never know. Data comes in, reports are auto generated online, it would look essentially good & valid. But I knew that when we started cutting the data into demographics, it was all bolloxed to hell. Even if the bar graphs looked like bar graphs, I knew the underlying data would be wonky. So I told him. And that unleashed a giant shit storm, group calls, pointing fingers, yuk. Jeff's boss was saying why the fuck are we doing live recruiting to a live study? But of course by then, those questions were too late. What did happen is we stopped the study, I cleaned the data best I could, gave them all the raw data, let them deal with it. They told me later they had their data team in India working on the data set for days, trying to unravel this live recruiting database fuckup. Oh and: I my work with them dried up.
But then, the big score. After touring several apartments and not digging any, mainly due to close neighbors & my need to listen to daily music, I found the magic place. Another converted tobacco warehouse. Top floor loft of 4 story converted warehouse. And, super cool: 15 foot ceilings. Amazing view out the window. Actual pic of my place:
