Most of the “Jack of All Trades” part of my personality comes from dad. He worked on cars, taught at a technical college, worked as a programmer, drove a taxi…the list goes on and on. Whenever the opportunity arose to help someone, friend or foe, he was there with his tools and a can-do attitude. There was nothing he wouldn’t try with all the confidence of a trained professional, but little of the skill.

Mom, however, was self-centered, anti-social, and convinced she was a modern Leonardo da Vinci. Her paintings, carvings, and statues were everywhere in our house. The problem with her was, if you didn’t drown her in praise, she assumed you hated her work, and her very existence. I don’t think she was completely sane.

Merged together, you get me, but with the third eye of seeing them as the world saw them. I’ll try to do anything, in secret. I don’t want people to see me fail, and unlike my mom, I assume everyone will see my stumbles while ignoring my successes.

I’m a good writer, programmer and database developer, but history has taught me to never assume I’m great at anything. I could be, but I don’t see it. This won’t stop me from trying my best, learning from each misstep, and getting better over time. I kind of have an obsessive personality.

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It took no effort at all to discover my dad’s big lie. Mom was confused, angry, violent… she had dementia. He kept this secret from his children for reasons I can’t comprehend. My wife, sister-in-law, and niece took care of her while dad recovered in a hospital. How they tolerated her nasty words and violent outbursts is nothing short of amazing.

My wife is an RN, and quickly realized my parents needed more help than we could provide, even after I left my job, so we moved them into an assisted living facility. Those places are expensive, like three times the cost of a mortgage on a good-sized single family home! We didn’t have a choice, and I assume others who experienced family dementia understand why they couldn’t keep living in their home without 24 hour monitoring.

When we cleaned out their house, I cataloged all the repairs it required, and there were a lot. I spent the next year and a half doing the best I could to get their house into shape for sale. During this time, last year in fact, my mother passed away from complications due to diabetes and dementia, leaving my dad alone in a facility that was only necessary because of mom.

Earlier this year I put dad’s home up for sale. To say I misjudged the housing market is an understatement. It didn’t sell, and now he’s out of money. I’m out of money as well. Next month, if it hasn’t sold, I’ll be moving him back into his house, but the repairs, and managing mom, has nearly bankrupted me. Luckily, my wife is still working.

I’d love to be a programmer or database person again, but I’m at an age where I’m no longer wanted in those fields. It won’t take much to right this ship. I just need to make a little per month to slowly reverse the financial damage this caused. I’m thinking… McDonald’s. We have a good history.

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Most of my efforts lately are centered around writing SEO friendly content for WordPress powered websites. I also create complex, database driven WordPress plugins that can do pretty much anything you want. My plugin PHP skills are insanely good and thorough, particularly so at my low hourly rate.

What’s my hourly rate? Well, it all depends on you. If you’re unrealistic and hyper-demanding, I’m going to be quite expensive. If you’re cool, I’m cheaper than most, if not all, of the highly skilled local developers you can find. No, I won’t compete dollar-for-dollar with Easter European, African, Chinese, or Indian developers. If you want to go cheap, that’s on you. Good luck. Fiverr is the place to look for that.

Unlike my foreign counterparts, I’ll meet with you, in person, at your office or a business of your choice (I really like coffee). I’ll even get with you to demonstrate updates on our ongoing project, if it’s a big one. Of course, this offer is only for businesses in the Jacksonville or Saint Augustine region of Northeastern Florida.

I’m competent in C#, PHP, and I can write Java, but it’s been a while. My T-SQL and overall database knowledge is legendary (in my own mind). Check out my career history for more information.

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Oh, the beautiful, sexy, beginning of the dot-com era. God, I miss those days, those companies, the deadlines, that feeling of imminent doom. I don’t know if it was the era or my age, but I loved the businesses I worked for back then, and I willingly sacrificed my health to do whatever they needed to be successful.

Maier Marketing was a crazy place. The owner clearly had some kind of bipolar disorder. Sorry if you’re still alive and reading this, but you were a trip. The 1990s was filled with startups run by drug-fueled men with mental disorders who lived for their business, and if you weren’t as excited as they were, you were fired, or at the very least, sidelined.

Every day at Maier Marketing was like working at a new company. The owner first brought me on as a software development consultant, but quickly coached me on how to get out of the contract so he could hire me. I worked mostly on web development, at first an in-house program for the sales people, then on large public systems. This was the first time I ever had to travel for a job. Holy crap, I love sales people, and I loved working with them in the field. It’s sad how the corporate world changed. I blame, and hate, Venture Capitalists.

As with most startups in the time, competition and innovation caused money issues. In a desperate plea to stay relevant, to stay alive, they merged with a larger marketing company. That bigger corporation neutered our owner and sucked the life out of our workplace.

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When I started here, it was called American Heritage Life Insurance. I guess Allstate bought them, but that transition is a blur.

The programming department at this division was huge. There had to be almost twenty of us, and that was just the programming staff. They had a dedicated testing department, and a full graphics development team. They even had a separate department for database administration. Allstate was the largest technology team I ever worked with, even to this day.

This job taught me a lot. I was first introduced to deep SQL (Database) development here, like views, indexes, stored procedures. They showed me the importance of performance minded code. My disturbing love for database development began at Allstate.

Allstate catapulted me into a more rounded understand of the inner-working of business. I was thrown into the deep end of knowledge about privacy, HIPAA compliance, disconnected data, documentation, meetings, encryption, screen scraping, and bureaucracy… so much bureaucracy. Things moved so fast, most of it is an obfuscated mess.

After two years, they placed me on a special projects team focused on rewriting their legacy Visual Basic code into the new C# development platform. That was a steep learning curve, and I’m a much better developer because of it.

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My stint at BellSouth didn’t last long, only two years. Looking back, it should have been obvious they were winding down their business. It was my first consulting job after moving to Florida, and I thought I hit the big time. For those who don’t know, BellSouth was a huge telecom company and internet provider at the time.

I got the job immediately during a fluke interview. They were having issues with their IIS server (Internet Information Server), the very same issue I dealt with in my previous job just a few weeks earlier. I must have impressed them.

This BellSouth hub was a customer service center. The building was huge, but only had a handful of employees…red flag number 1. I was tasked with writing software that monitored the efficiency of their customer service representatives. I made a huge display that monitored their work in real-time and displayed a constantly updating leader board. That would never be allowed today. Way too many feels.

My supervisor was a friendly guy, but hinted at corporate financial issues. Obvious red flag number 2. The company tasked him with implementing a hardware solution to “roll up” our hub allowing a different hub to take over in another state during emergencies, like hurricanes, or union strikes. Not so obvious red flag number 3.

One day I got a call telling me they sold the company and rolled our hub up into the bigger one in Tennessee. They fired me.

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Company: SuperStock, Inc.
Location: Jacksonville, FL
Industry: Online Stock Photography
Duties: VB.Net and C# developer. Database Developer. Database Administrator.

SuperStock was a fun company to work for, until the Venture Capitalists took over. I have to be careful here because the VC in charge literally threatened to sue me for $600,000 when I (allegedly) hurt his (alleged) feelings. I still have the paperwork. His (alleged) lawyer was terrible (in my opinion) and easily manipulated (in my opinion). I hope that VC (alleged) guy fired his (alleged) loser lawyer.

Now, back to SuperStock pre-VC. My primary function at SuperStock was maintaining a high performance, replicated, database server. We had millions of stock photos and videos with tens of millions of search tags. It was my responsibility to ensure searches came back with relevant results, and in sub-second time.

There was a lot of older ASP code that needed to be upgraded to the new (at the time) Microsoft ASP.Net platform. My duties included rewriting and testing code as well as developing the system to tag photos. AI would have been nice and very helpful back then.

I worked at the company for three years with no issues… until the VCs reared their (allegedly) ugly heads. Bridge burned.

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I worked at Leonard’s Photography, a family owned business, for about seven years. That was easily the longest job stint of my life. The company’s main focus is school and military photography… think Year Books. They create merchandise as well, but photography is their bread and butter.

My duties at Leonard’s were primarily database related, MySQL, MariaDB, and Microsoft SQL. There was also a lot of text data that needed to be manipulated into the system. Mostly DBF, CSV, and Excel (XLS) files.

My biggest accomplishment at Leonard’s was the creation of a data synchronization program, written in C#. It maintained one large database of almost all the company’s information by monitoring for changes in text data and replicating them, in real-time, into the database.

Why did I leave?

On occasion, I was tasked with working in “the field”. I’d go to school photo sessions and monitor the photo archiving software and hardware. This triggered a desire to work outside my dimly lit cubicle. After a few years, sitting at a desk became quite unpleasant. I wanted to get out more, but pay increases made me too expensive for that.

The biggest reason I left? COVID. It changed everything and everyone. Life never went back to normal. I felt isolated from people while at work.

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It was a great time to be a software developer. The money was incredible, and you actually felt like you were part of something bigger, important.

Gone are the days of lavish Christmas parties, profit sharing, and corporate cheerleading events where a coke-addled CEO would amp us up for the next business quarter. Jobs are so boring now. Companies only pretend to be the way they were. Yes, you’ll find a few with game rooms, or nap rooms (seriously?), but there’s no connection, no bond anymore. We were never truly special in the dot-com era, but we felt special.

Now, work-from-home is the latest trend in corporate America, and it makes sense. Companies are so bland and mind-numbingly boring, that working from home is the natural evolution to keep employees from abandoning them. Without that spark, they really have nothing left to offer. When WFH gets old, and it will, corporations are in for a painful awakening. Maybe they’ll circle back to being a place we looked forward to, where we actually wanted to give 110%.

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I live without fear of consequences when it pertains to my career or hobby decisions. You want me to build a shed from reclaimed driftwood? Sure, I can do that… probably. I’ve never done it before, but I’m certain I’ll figure it out along the way.

No, I’m not a psychopath, at least no professionals have ever labeled me as such. I don’t wish ill or harm on anyone, but I don’t fret over their self-inflicted suffering either, and my definition of self-inflicted is extremely broad.

This is where make-believe comes into play. At some point during my midlife crisis, I stopped seeing events as ruling my life. Everything became a story, like a book, television show, or movie. Each situation compartmentalized into its own silo, a silo I could just walk away from and forget about while I visited another silo. There are a lot of disparate silos in my head.

Basically, every aspect of my life exists independently of the others. My make-believe multiverse of reality is a catalog of shows that I choose to live inside until I get bored or frustrated and move on to the next show.

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