back to Volume 1

So … Why do this Dave Sandwich web/writing project now?

Mostly because I never before had the time required. I have had to to work on other things full time, for most of my life. First, starting at 16 years old, that work was as a house painter with my Cousin Neil in Boston and Cambridge; then I transitioned to banging nails, eventually opened my own cabinet shop in Waltham MA; I moved to NH in 1984, bought a cape house and 15 acres, got a part time carpentry job, and continued my building and RE career in Meredith NH for 12 years, from 1984 to 1996.

Then in 1996, the result of many odd coincidences I’ll got into later, I ended u starting the the 2Square Carromboard Co, and for a fabulous, busy 5 years I  was truly ‘the first US Manufacturer of International Standard Carrom Boards’, in my Meredith NH workshop. I was also a world-trotting international carrom player and competitor. Eventually, however, my carrom dream began to suffer the weight of too much physical work, too many broken deadlines, not enough income, too few tournament glories, and general entropy. Also, critically, my sporting career began to overlap – and conflict, in many cases –  with my other passion: all things computer and software and web, which had  basically ben latent until the day Tim Berners Lee (creator of the www) first shined his little flashlight into my brain, and whispered this:

‘Psssst … hey Dave: every piece of information in the world will soon at your fingertips, and – get this – you now own your own TV station, music business, self help empire, and publishing house. Have fun, Dude.’

The light went on in my head the moment I heard that whisper, and it has never gone off.

Dave’s Geek Years

But I still needed money, like everyone else. So I’ve had an interesting and rewarding Web career. In some kind of order, my skill acquisitions and job situations:

Begin, 1988: Mac+ fonts fun; Corel Draw; Quark, Compuserve and Prodigy; HTML 1; Photoshop and Illustrator; cool late 90’s job at boutique tech firm, Merrimack; Cold Fusion; PHP; ASP; A ski accident, a sudden window, and a year at PSU on deep research in Database Theory, Linux, and Java Programming; ; Early self started ‘Omworks’ web sites for friends’; decision to get out of building web sites for friends; realization that ‘Web Designer’ was no long a cool job; Now not a job at all; cool job as webaster at startup in Meredith; Taxonomy and Design; Web Systems Management and first lessons in corporate opacity, inefficiency and social BS; company lays off 15% of workers so somebody can get rich; Dave laid off for no reason by moderately incompetent, oafish boss (Bubba);

Work break 2003-2007 – Build remote, mountainside, Squam-viewed, off-grid 3000 sq. ft 4 bath dream home for wife and self to heal; begging and borrowing and stealing and grinding for 3 years; live happily in beautiful house; write first draft of Kung Fu-ey stoner thesis on carpentry’s mystical lessons. Decide it sucks. Put it in drawer; take it out again and now decide for sure it;’s really the entire ME that sucks; put back in drawer; and….

And Back to Work: get re-hired 3 years later at same old company becaue I run into Katie at the deli and she tells me about opening; kind of bummed to have to work again (so much for the writing great new boss; great new bosses quality means he is immediately promoted elsewhere; get a series of moderately incompetent management-type bosses who don’t know a thing about web site but want to make their mark; Build web enabled, PHP/MySql, 400-dollar-overhead-a-year Global Service Process and Field Service Parts Tracking and data analysis without really asking my boss for permission, with the help of kindest co-worker in world and best coder,  who is still doing his job and now mine; everybody loves my CMS for 2 years of happiness; managers love the data I output; Bubba becomes boss again (?); Jerry and new disruptor global VP (Jack) think Salesforce is better and go that way without asking Dave’ s advice; at Salesforce summit, Dave is informed that he will build, spec, configure, and launch the SF project and train everyone to use it; Dave leaves next day; Dave works out his anger and goes to Plan C.

I think that gets us to the end of one thread, and the beginning of another …