Other Destinations

My past is, if not chequered, at least is varied. I started out my working career as a stockbroker. I also did options and commodities trading over the 8 years at that job. Then I hired a man I saw as a bit of a father figure. He convinced me into doing some stock trades which were questionable. I willingly did them, as it made money and I needed money. The market was down. We had to sell our home. I could barely make the rent, and Carla was a young Mom with three small children.

Those are all excuses, however. I don't know if I could have withstood the man's blandishments even if the market was good and I was making money. I did the trades. I authorised his trades, at least until the Vancouver Stock Exchange and BC Securities commission noticed the trading pattern as a kind of pump and dump. Both he and I got hauled in. He was fired; he was the principal behind the trades. I was given a three month suspension. So there I was, no job at all, unable to earn money, with mounting bills.

In the first few weeks, I took some time to look at myself. The man who permitted those trades, the man who put money before honour, that was not the man I wanted to be. I decided at that point it would never happen again in my life. Nothing was worth my good name. Nothing was worth going to jail over, missing my kids and family over. Instead I assessed my skills and decided I would get into sales training, preferably retail sales training, where I knew what I was doing and was clearly good at it.

So I started my own training practice. Things were slow, but with the help of friends and my Unemployment Insurance check, I got it off the ground. Then, about six months into things, I got a call from a fellow I knew in New York. Would I be interested in developing sales and product training for financial service firms? Sure I would. So off I went to NYC, starting off the next interesting leg of my career.

I ended up doing sales, management, and most ironically, ethics training for Wall Street firms and major banks. My work pattern was simple enough. I would get a contract to develop something. I would go to the firm's head office and various branches to see how they viewed the training objective. Then I would go home, think about it, and develop a training program for them, including printing masters of any training aids, printed material, slides as needed, sales tools, and any other paraphernalia they had asked for. I did printed training, video programs, conferences, all kinds of things.

My development method was simple for me, yet immensely frustrating for Chris Smith, my associate for a number of years. I would sit, doodling, doing little. Since he was in part dependent on my output, it meant he would sit too. Sometimes the most important thing he did with me was to toss a football around, so I could talk through something out loud, while he caught the ball and responded to ideas. Then, in a great many cases, the whole program would be ejected out of me, near fully formed, onto the keyboard and mouse, out of the printer. I would often start in the afternoon of a given day, barely notice the departure of Chris, then work all night. He would come in the next morning to find the work essentially complete, leaving him to edit and touch up as needed.

For a while, just doing this was enough. Then I got both bored with it, and curious about the new technologies emerging all around me. This process had actually begun in the mid-eighties, with a corporate implementation of a new kind of communications network, followed by my own interest in networks. This was all before the implementation of the World Wide Web standard, that which most people dub the Internet, not knowing that the Internet itself has been around since the late 1950's. But that's another story.

As my interested in technology grew along with my boredom with developing training, my focus naturally shifted. My training business faltered, and I began doing more technology consulting. This culminated in a complete shift, first of all as a Director of Technology Programs for a small training institute, then as a Deployment Manager for a small software development firm, and finally as the IT Manager for a company called Ernex, the points program manager for a number of small firms, and one really big one, the Royal Bank.

I lasted there for about three years. Then, at age 50, I started working with my brother Peter as a Project Management Trainer and Consultant. This involved delivering training programs as well as developing specialised PM training for a number of clients, including Microsoft Europe. It was a great gig, one which ultimately lead me here to Calgary, doing Project Management on contract for the Calgary Board of Education while doing the training gig on the side.

And then came ALS. All of it stopped.

Except for one thing. The constant in virtually all my work has been travel. As a broker, I didn't travel much; once or twice to Toronto and on the occasional sales junket. As a trainer for Wall Street, I travelled extensively, often as much as one or two weeks a month. While working in my IT management roles, there were still the occasional bits of travel, but not as much as I would have liked. However the need for travel blossomed, even exploded, while working with my brother, Peter. His sponsorship took me to the UK, much of Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, and all over North America.

After ALS, I have continued to travel as much as I can. I've been all around the US, across Canada twice in my truck, and done several road trips with David. Cuba, Mexico, and Hawaii have all made the list. It's become much more difficult in the last year or so. Now I have to have a Care Aide with me if I even want to go overnight somewhere.

Still, if I could travel more, I would. Alas I have neither the funds nor the Aide, so until at least one of those problems is solved, I am stuck with day trips, in need of help for even the simplest of voyage. I am ever grateful that David and others will take me in the van. Even a short trip is better than sitting at home, looking out my window. Even the smallest of rides can turn into an adventure in my mind as I remember places I have been, things I have seen, people I have travelled with.

Life is a journey, not a destination.To say you have arrived is to miss completely the other destinations open to you. I want to see those other destinations.