Dateline: '96ish.
After the Gantz-Wiley fiasco, whatever you wonder, did I do next? Well pull up a chair boys & girls whilst I weave a tale of another craptastic career move. I got another gig, for about 6 months, a software teaching gig at Computrain or ExecuTrain or something like that. One of those types.
Teaching corporate computer classes was a good gig for me, content wise. I was totally fine with public speaking, did it for 18 months in South Dakota, stay tuned for that upcoming surrealistic nightmare blog. Also, I'm a quick study with software. Back around that time my buddy taught me how to build a computer, so I was good with both hardware & software. Yeah, geek alert.
We taught 4x/week, all over the city, & 1 day solo on the 'help line' that was included free for all attendees. Classes were actual training; 6 hours long.
I said my sassiest reply ever to a student during a database class; recall it vividly. A 'bro' type had been mildly heckling me all day. Not bad but annoying. Here is the actual exchange, in front of 20 other adults mind you:
Heckler: Are we going to do any queries today?
Me: No but maybe you'll get lucky this weekend.
That was an instant reply; it's how my brain works. I immediately thought 'oh hell that was over the line' but they remained all staring at their screens, thank god.
There was a mandatory company summer picnic near their HQ, on a lake deep in the southern burbs, on a Friday. Pickle was, I had planned a weekend getaway way way up in N. MN, Paul Bunyan country, a 4+ hr drive from there. I went to the picnic but split early. So apparently, they were giving out awards, I won something, they called my name, and I of course had split by then. Oops. So the ceo called me into his office the next week for a scolding. He inherited the company from his dad, and it showed. Clueless. He went on and on about some mistake he had made earlier in his career and how he worked hard to overcome it, and how I could do the same. I had no interest in teaching software classes long term and couldn't figure out why he thought I would. I gave zero fucks about this scolding, and mainly thought what a moron he was.
I was working the help desk one day near the end and the phone rang nonstop from the morning through the entire day. Anyone using MS Word had the 'save as' option greyed out. Yes folks, this was the infamous 'melissa' macro virus / worm. If you were in corporate america in the mid 90s you got it also. The first macro virus. Harmless, but annoying af. And lucky me was working help desk that day, having no fucking clue why nobody could 'save as' a file to a new name. Ring ring nonstop, all day. Now, we would check twitter for this but they didn't exist yet. Maybe this was karma for splitting the picnic.
I landed a corporate gig next, where I would spend the next 7 years. I gave a 1 week notice, my team lead, cool guy, begged me for 2 weeks but the ceo scolding had recently happened and I said nay, I'm splitting for my new gig, an actual career gig.
And here's the kicker: my very last week of teaching there, an entire team from my soon to be new company took a class with me. I may have mentioned that at the end of the class maybe, but no matter. An oddly karmic way to finish my last week there, non?