Note: We are in the final stages of getting the printed copies of “The Anarchist’s Workbench” complete and ready for shipping. It will be soon, and I’ll publish the details here when I have news. You can, of course, download the whole book for free here.
I’ve been asked why I wrote this book. Was it to spite a former employer or a corporate publisher? Nah. That’s not me. If you’re looking for the Revenge and Vengeance Department, press 1 to talk to my wife, Lucy. Instead, I think I wrote this book to get this story out of my system so I could move onto the next phase of my life as a woodworker and writer.
One of my biggest personality flaws can be explained with this simple story. I asked a blacksmith to make me a metal planing stop. He insisted that the best planing stops were made from railroad spikes and that he would charge me just $20 for the thing.
The box arrived, and I opened it. I took one look at the toothy and crusty metal stop and said: Nope. I refused to install it on the bench, and so my first adjustable planing stop was wooden. It worked OK. But I had absolutely no idea what I was missing until I installed a metal one two years and five months later.
I wonder sometimes: What is my malfunction? I could have installed the metal stop in an hour. If it didn’t work, I could have made a replacement wooden one in a second hour.
This kind of crap – holding desperately onto something that works OK instead of taking a small step that could improve everything – is exactly what kept me immobilized in corporate America way past my expiration date.
From the day I entered the workforce as an adult in June 1990 until I said “I quit” to my boss at Popular Woodworking in 2011, I was intent on holding onto every job I had. Getting fired or laid off crossed my mind almost every day. And (even worse) that fear seemed to make all the important decisions in my career. A few highlights:
For five years I wrote freelance copy for the now-defunct Woodworker’s Book Club and poured that money into my workshop at home. My rationale: I wanted to be ready to work as an independent furniture maker on the day that I got canned.
It wasn’t the stupidest fear. Being a journalist these days is almost as irrelevant as being a wheelwright or the guy who makes coats from the foreskins of sperm whales (that’s a real thing, by the way; you know I wouldn’t lie to you re: whale dongs). But it did make me do stupid things.
My office at home was next to my daughters’ bedrooms, and while banging out meaningless monthly drivel for the Woodworkers’ Book Club, Maddy would beg me to play “Baldur’s Gate” with her on the computer. More often than not, I put her off in order to get the freelance work done on time. And so Maddy would wait for me in my office and she illustrated a little book (that I still own) titled “The Monsters of Baldur’s Gate” containing advice for us.
Yeah, even then I felt like a crap parent. But I rationalized that all the freelance work would save us from future disaster. We wouldn’t have to go back to the days when our checking account dipped below $100 every two weeks, right before payday.
Every month, I got a check from the Book Club. I put half away for taxes. The rest I spent on the tools I thought I needed for a one-bad-father furniture shop. For starters: a chop saw, drill press, spray finishing equipment, mortiser, compressor with many nail guns and a stupid jig for drilling shelf-pin holes. These weren’t tools I really wanted to own. But they were tools I knew other furniture makers owned.
I’m not a prepper, but I think this is what it must feel like to put away 1,000 gallons of potable water and 300 cans of beans for the apocalypse. As my shop at home came together, I began to feel less anxious about being fired. I was ready.
One day one of my woodworking friends shut down his shop and went to work for his wife. Despite his talents (he’s a better woodworker than I’ll ever be), the work had dried up. The phone had stopped ringing. He had all of the tools (even a Timesaver wide-belt sander that was bigger than my truck). Plus, he had the skills and 20 years of experience. But nobody wanted to hire him.
This freaked me out. Owning the tools was not enough.
I started trolling around for commission furniture work, even if it didn’t pay much. I decided I had to build a customer base. (Tools plus customers equals job security, right?) I began making Morris chairs and selling them on eBay. I started building pieces for my wife’s boss, hoping he would spread my name among his wealthy friends. I even dabbled in trimming out a kitchen or two owned by friends in Cincinnati’s Northside neighborhood.
So I was building furniture at night. On other evenings I was still writing copy for the Woodworker’s Book Club. I hadn’t picked up my guitar in years. And “Baldur’s Gate” remained unsolved.
One week at work I received two phone calls that seemed like a gift. Marc Adams called to ask if I would teach at his school in Indiana. Then Kelly Mehler called to ask if I would teach at his school in Kentucky.
I said yes to both. Becoming a woodworking teacher was another layer of economic protection. I thought: Even if this bad thing happened and those other bad things happened, I also had teaching. I would be impossible to snuff out.
This is the point in the story where it should all come crashing down. But it doesn’t.
One of the many reasons I started Lost Art Press was to have something else to fall back on – yes, another stopgap – for when I was finally fired at Popular Woodworking. That fear might seem irrational. My only defense is that magazine editors are flushed with more regularity than most people’s bowels. Every year at Popular Woodworking I attended four or five going-away parties at bars for colleagues who had been canned.
The horror always seemed to be just around the corner. Even if you had 10 or 12 glowing yearly evaluations behind you [Editor’s note: Or 19], there was a decent chance that you’d soon be at the Buffalo Wild Wings on Lane Avenue, drunk and with your car’s trunk full of your kids’ drawings. Which used to decorate your cubicle.
So I worked. April became a bad month and a bitter family joke. My youngest daughter’s birthday is at the end of April, and I missed it about five years in a row because I was teaching out of town.
OK, I know for certain that the narrative arc should now take us to the breaking point. It wasn’t, however, a made-for-TV moment.
I was teaching a workbench class at Kelly Mehler’s school in May of 2011 when my mom phoned me in the middle of class. I knew it was bad news. Her brother (my uncle), Thomas West, had just died. He was 71.
I wasn’t close to my Uncle Tom. Instead I had always been in awe of him and was too timid to talk to him at the rare family gatherings. He was the genius in the family and had a newsworthy career at Data General. Tracy Kidder wrote a Pulitzer-prize-winning book about him, “The Soul of a New Machine.”
After my mother told me the news, I sat down. A switch had gone off in my head that I still cannot explain to this day.
I finished up the class and got into my truck to go home. I stopped at the Shell station down the road from Kelly’s school to fill up my tank for the drive. I remember my hands shaking as I pulled the fuel nozzle from the truck.
I got in the car and called Lucy.
“I want to quit my job,” I told her.
“OK,” she said. “Come home, and we’ll figure it out.”
That was on a Friday evening. On Monday I turned in my resignation letter at the magazine. I think I was as shocked about the moment as my boss was.
All those years of preparing for the day – buying tools, building up a commission book, teaching, starting a company – none of that was helpful or comforting in that moment.
On my last day at the magazine, I loaded up the last of my tools. I plugged my phone into the stereo. It picked up where I’d left off in the morning with Superchunk’s “Learning to Surf.”
I should have quit years before I did. I know that now. The freelancing, teaching, commission work and publishing were all excuses. I thought: If I built this business, then I’d be ready. If I built that business, then I’d really be ready.
I had been ready for years but had been too chickenshit to write the resignation letter. I know this might seem like a “chicken and the egg” paradox, but I was an overcooked baby. I hid in the womb. And boy is my therapist gonna have a field day with this paragraph.
I drove home to my family and thought: Now I’m going to be a better father and husband. And I was. I picked up my kids from school every day. I was home for birthdays and graduations and the landmarks. I made dinner every night. (I still haven’t finished “Baldur’s Gate,” however.)
This, I thought, is the reward for escaping the corporate world: More time with my family and the freedom to run my own life. But I was wrong. The real reward would come seven years later when my father lay dying.
At some point in my life, the following piece of trivia got lodged in my brain: There’s sufficient evidence that the word “deadline” meant something fairly sinister in Confederate prisons during the U.S. Civil War. The “dead line” was literally a line marked in the ground to restrain prisoners. Cross the “dead line” and you would be shot.
This thought crossed my mind several times as I edited magazine stories and approved page layouts at the foot of my father’s hospital bed after his first cancer surgery.
I was in downtown Chicago in the middle of winter trying, with the help of my sisters, to get my dad through the procedure in a city that was a world away from our Arkansas home.
I was also responsible for editing two woodworking magazines, one of which was just about to go on press.
My boss had, with great grace, allowed me to leave town to attend my dad’s surgery. No questions and no complaints. The only catch was that I had to keep the magazine running. We couldn’t miss printing deadlines. That’s when things got royally screwed up and it began costing the company money.
There also is an unspoken rule at most media companies. If you miss hard deadlines, you will – sooner rather than later – be fired. No matter how good the content is that you produce, editors who blow deadlines are marked as difficult. And difficult editors are the first ones to go as soon as the magazine’s budget or reputation hits the tiniest pebble.
Among the consultations with nurses and doctors I wrote an article about cutting tenons by hand. I approved about 100 pages of layouts. I edited an entire magazine issue with my laptop perched on my knees. I made dinner for my sisters. And I drove my dad back to Arkansas with his colostomy bag on the floorboards of my pickup truck.
When we pulled into town in Fort Smith, Ark., it was late, and my dad was craving fried chicken livers. I looked at him over the rim of my glasses.
“Really?” I asked.
My dad – the guy who ate sprouts and whole wheat bread for lunch every day – wanted some deep-fried organ meat?
“I think I need the iron,” he said.
I pulled into a Church’s Chicken that had just closed for the night. In my hometown, white people don’t go to Church’s; we’re supposed to go to KFC. So, I know it freaked out the employees when a long-haired bearded white dude banged on the door asking for chicken livers. The manager came to the door a little wary. I explained my problem.
He started up the deep fryer and made my dad a double order. Which dad gobbled up before we made it the two miles to his house.
I got my father into his bed, where he fell asleep immediately after an entire day in the car. I wasn’t tired, and so I wandered around his house.
This wasn’t the house I’d grown up in, but it was filled with the things my dad had made. There were the Japanese garden benches on his deck – a design of his so perfect that I ripped it off for a magazine article years later. There was the weird glass-topped coffee table that was made from about 120 pieces of redwood that had all been bolted together using all-thread – no glue.
coordination, including chairmaking and playing piano.
I sat down in the living room and tried to decompress after the journey. And I noticed something new and curvy on the other side of the room. I walked over to investigate. It was a heating register made from wood, but it was handmade, pierced and carved with lovely curves. Who does that?
I knew the answer.
When I was a kid, my dad had built (and finished) furniture while confined to bedrest after some spinal surgery. He taught himself how to veneer furniture, build decorative brick walls and design houses (two of his original designs still stand today) before he was 40. He took piano lessons in his 50s. Vocal lessons in his 60s. Cello lessons in his 70s. If he wanted to do something, he just did it.
And here I was terrified of missing a printing deadline.
My dad and I were usually close. You would think that we’d be closer because we both loved making things. But we seemed to see handwork through different lenses. While he loved making things – furniture, music, pottery – it was the reward or the release after his difficult and meaningful work. My dad was a family physician.
For me, making things was the difficult and meaningful work. He wanted me to be a lawyer.
After I quit my job at Popular Woodworking I didn’t see my dad as much. He was building a new life in Charleston, S.C., and I was trying to forge a life as an independent furniture maker, writer, publisher and teacher. And trying to be a decent parent (if not a decent son).
In 2016, dad’s cancer came roaring back. And that was when I knew I had made the right decision to leave the corporate world. After talking to my dad on the phone one evening, I said, “I’ll be there tomorrow.” I packed my bags and threw them in my truck. I didn’t ask anyone for permission.
I just went. I didn’t have any deadlines. Well, not for work.
When I arrived in Charleston the next afternoon my dad was impossibly skinny. He had converted to a vegan diet a few years before and was an insufferable evangelist about it, to boot.
“You hungry?” he asked. “I know a place.”
During my previous visit the “place” was a Vietnamese gas station that served zero meat, eggs or dairy. In fact, I think they waited for the vegetables to drop off the vine before harvesting them.
We drove north on the peninsula to a neighborhood that had been crime ridden for decades. He pulled into a parking lot that was awash in the smell of brisket and smoked pork.
“Really?” I asked.
“It’s going to change your life,” he said.
We sat down in one of the booths and waited for lunch to arrive. And I waited for him to tell me exactly how bad things were with his cancer (they were bad). I had left my laptop and my phone in my truck or back at his house, where they would sit for a few days.
And then I did something I hadn’t done since I was 5 or 6. I reached out across the table and grabbed his hand. He raised his eyebrows, smiled and nodded.
For the next eight months I drove to Charleston to visit him almost every month, taking turns with my sisters in taking care of him to the end.
Every time I packed my truck up for the trip, I had this same thought: I couldn’t do this if I still had a corporate job. So, during my visits, instead of writing magazine stories while my father’s health spiraled slowly downward, we watched “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune” every night together. I made him dinner (he gave up on veganism at his doctor’s request; plus, he really wanted some brisket). And when he was feeling only half-horrible, we went to his favorite restaurants.
When he died, I was sitting on his bed with him and my sisters, singing his favorite Crosby, Stills & Nash songs. It’s a morning that I will always be grateful for.
I’m not saying that quitting your job will make you a better person. But it did for me.
Today I still work damn hard. You have to when you work for yourself. In fact I work just as hard as I did when I had to meet my corporation’s personal performance and financial goals, fearful of not being rated as “exceeds expectations.” (My reward for exceeding expectations? A 3 percent merit raise. Yup, I worked every weekend so they could reward me with $2,400.)
But now I can turn my work off like a water faucet. When I want to take my daughter to the art museum, I just do it. When I feel the urge to hike the Red River Gorge with my family, I make the reservations that instant instead of checking to see how many days of PTO I have banked.
And when I want to build a workbench, I don’t have to ask Steve for permission. I don’t have to submit the plans for the bench to a bunch of people who really don’t give a crap about traditional woodworking.
I just do it. And it’s on the following page.
— Christopher Schwarz
This may be my favorite article to date. Thank you.
Hallo Chris, thanks for summarizing this for us. Whilst dealing with similar decisions to make, at least I made the same security business options work as you did.
As you said, quitting a safe employment is not an easy decision. I think you had probably found just the right time, as you built the fundamentals of your audience in advance. Giving everything into it as you do was finally rewarded as we can see today. I’ll see if I can find the right time for my decisions, too.
Thanks again for this way more than traditional handtool woodworking inspiration.
All the best,
Alexander
Beautiful. Thank you.
Pretty much sums up what I did in my corporate working career and my life only I quit when I was 60.
I did what you did for the same reasons, I went through 5 different jobs always afraid I was going to be fired or let go. My dad was similar to yours in abilities, right down to building houses and making anything needed ( and dying of cancer).
It was a surprise to read this piece by you here I thought I was alone with the fear of losing my job. I should have quit my last job way before I did, it was killing me.
Worse I even had my walking away money so I could have done it earlier. I guess the thing is I did do it finally and yes my life improved.
Thank you for this, Christopher.
Thank you, Chris. Your article struck many chords with me. For so, so many years I feared losing my job because of losing insurance, losing the ability to pay bills, etc. Being laid off 5 times due to no fault of my own taught me some lessons about being able to keep going in spite of it all. Somehow another job was found. Somehow the bills eventually got paid. Finally, one day I had a chance to quit, and I’ve never looked back. It hasn’t been easy street. I still work hard. But like you say, when I need to stop for some reason, I don’t have to ask permission. Another big advantage for working for myself is that I can set my schedule for the most part which is a huge thing for me.
Awesome story, thanks!
Great article, thanks for sharing
Great entry Chris! One day I decided I had enough of the corporate life. I was 64 and had done some sort of programming for 37 years. Corporate said something about submitting goals for the next 2 years and I thought my goal is to retire NOW. In high tech most people give months notice so that I replacement could be found and you train them. However I had been thru countless layoffs and had been laid off twice. I decided that they didn’t really treat me as a person only as an “asset” so I gave them the customary 2 weeks notice. I’ve never looked back and couldn’t be happier. I’m selling crap on Etsy and people buy them enough to keep me out of trouble.
Powerful stuff. Thank you.
That was beautiful. Thank you.
You inspire me. I’m new at woodworking (in step one: learning how to sharpen and ruined one chisel already). I really enjoy everything you do and I learn so much from it. Thank you very much! I also like reading but somehow your writings are particularly a pleasure to read. Your books and articles are very good, but I must agree that this article could be the best of them all: It touches peoples minds and hearts. I can totally relate to your experience with work but most meaningful your experience with your father (brought some tears). Keep doing the great work and sharing them with us mortals. I look forward to the day where I am able to produce with hand tools a nice piece of something in wood and pass it to my children. I may never be a Chris Schwarz but I will get close to it: I’m from June 12 same year 🙂
This is why I shouldn’t read your essays first thing in the morning. How am I supposed to work now!? Seriously though, it’s a great essay. I sent it on to my brother who lives very close to you and suggested we visit when you re-open. Thanks for writing it.
This is Schwarz’s G.O.A.T. essay. Amazing!
Gosh, you are such a good writer….
Perfect
Good man (men).
Always inspired… One of the many reasons I read your blog first when I open my laptop each morning
As Dave said – your blog is first read each morning, letting a little sanity into a crazy world.
I lucked out as the project completed and the corporation let me go. It was frightening but I drifted off learning to support myself. It’s been 42 years.
Today I have Grankid duties. I’ll drop in to the shop a couple of times to see if they need me.
I enjoy your personal stories as much as your technical articles. Starting with “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” I have read and re-read each of your books and always recommend or loan your books to friends.
Thank you for your work.
Dick
Beautifully written, touching story. Merci.
Bravo! You did what I should have done sooner. There is nothing more rewarding than a life well lived. We only get 1 and we never know for how long. My father used to tell me “never sell your tools, as long as you have them you can feed and shelter yourself”
I know, I’ve commented this once before, but THIS was by far your best post (at least for me.) The honesty. The heart. The vulnerability. What can I say, you keep getting better. I hate my job. I hate corporate culture. I hate performance reviews and petty pay raises for work that maybe feeding my family but is starving my soul. I hate always feeling like I’m one small mistake away from being fired. Your words struck home in so many ways. Feeling pressured to return to work after my father passed leaving me to settle the estate and clean up a lifetime of hoarding… The stress that comes from hating your work but not enough to overcome the fear of unemployment… The years of neglecting my marriage and my children… Long days that leave me too exhausted to spend time in the shop… The last 20 years have turned me into a man that I barely recognize and often don’t like very much. I wish I could say that I am finally able to declare my own independence…but I’m not. Not yet. But it does help, in some small way, to know that someone I respect can relate. Thank You.
I wish I had more to say in a comment on this post. It’s perfect, and thank you for sharing all these years, you’ve helped innumerable people grow, and not just in woodworking skills.
There’s always time for comments on a post such as this, Jeremy… that said, mine will likely be very short. It’s not the lack of words or time that refrains me, but six months of awful anxiety brought into clarity by this stupid pandemic that leaves me struggling with thoughts on my own aging parents and dreams for a cleaner, healthier life.
Awesome! Did the same thing over 30 years ago, except with typesetting, and never looked back.
There are notes in this story that play a song I’m familiar with. I will raise a glass to you and your dad tonight and thank you for sharing your journey.
What a great article. I’ve been a horrible woodworker for the past 30 years, but i am inspired to do better. As a corporate chaser, my woodworking has been just as harried as my professional life. Only now, have I seemed to turn a corner, where I can slow down and enjoy. Articles like this remind me of what I’ve missed out on, but also remind me that it’s not too late. All my best.
Beautiful work.
Thank you.
[passes tissues to the next commenter]
You did a great job at PW. Under your tenure, it became one of the best woodworking publications on the shelf. No small feat!
Today I learned that whale foreskin leather actually exists…
Clearly should have been the material of choice for the mole skin work vest. Hey Chris, when can we expect to see that offered?
I was struck by, and archived, this quote in the NYT:
”I try to keep in mind that if I dropped dead tomorrow, all of my acrylic workplace awards would be in the trash the next day, and my job would be posted in the paper before my obituary.”
— Bernie Klinder, a consultant for a large tech company, The New York Times, Jan. 26, 2019
Damn, this is good.
Chris, I have followed your journey from the days of PWW (loved Woodworking Magazine) and have many but not all of LAP Books (some too hardcore for my taste; woodworking is a hobby for me). I finally left my corporate shackles in 2015 and echo your sentiments. Your blog has been a constant source of “courage” for me when doubt and fear threatened my self confidence and I questioned the wisdom of the path I was taking. Most business biographies look back on life through a lens of accomplishment and success. However, they are light on the blood, sweat and tears that went into making that success. Your honesty in this area is not only refreshing but is also inspiring a whole bunch of people (like me) to undertake their own journey (may not be in woodworking). I hope one day you do decide to write a book on how to start a business and the associated trials and tribulations. Wishing you health, happiness and much more success in the years ahead.
A really moving & inspiring piece. Thanks!!
Many thanks Christopher. I myself haven’t been bold enough yet to make that transition. But this takes me one step closer.
Thank you so much for sharing this. Your story, both of dealing with your own journey, and your relationship with your dad’s provides so much perspective. This is powerful stuff.
Thank you for this and the entire book. Looking forward to receiving the hard copy. I am slightly concerned that you are transitioning from woodworker, historian, and publisher to an Essayist. I don’t want to subscribe to the New Yorker or haunt the remainders tables at Barnes & Noble to find your work. There is an ever-renewable source of young writers sharing their musings on the mutability and seasonality of life. We have plenty of pieces on spider’s webs, pigs, baseball, and selecting pumpkins in a patch at autumn. We have few to make us feel passionately about resultant chair angles, the importance of rosette-headed nails, or the reason a No. 42 MF coping saw is so much better than a No. 43. Still, the occasional reminder of how lives fit together is to be highly valued. Thank you.
Marc,
I think that’s unlikely. Woodworking is what gets me up in the morning and makes me plop exhausted into bed.
All I seek to do is to breathe some life into woodworking writing. Most of it on the shelves reads more like a technical manual. Nothing wrong with that – at all. But I can’t do that either.
What else can be said. This article moved me. Thank you. Really makes me want to take a step back, and evaluate my life.
Sometimes I’m moved by what I read. This felt like an old school hockey check !
Leaving my job never entered my head til I had thirty years in.
I’m A retired cop and ex marine and you made made me cry and, feel better. Thanks
Tom West… That’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
I recently came across my copy of “The Soul of a New Machine” and started reading it again. See, I worked for Data General while the events in the book were unfolding, as did my wife. She worked in the Westboro teadquarters with the wives of several of the engineers mentioned in the book as well.
I never met Tom, and always wished I had.
He was a good man.
What a beautiful, inspirational post, and with a touch of humor. That sperm whale mohel must be a badass!
“And when I want to build a workbench, I don’t have to ask Steve for permission. I don’t have to submit the plans for the bench to a bunch of people who really don’t give a crap about traditional woodworking.
I just do it.” And you have. That work bench, is a lean, hard, ready to just do it, article of human perfection; it’s prepared and purposeful. I stared at its picture for a while, it looked familiar, but more important it looked better. The best of so many other prior pieces of work, put together in one efficient, effective tool. It says, put me to work, and I won’t put you to shame.
Just like you.
I read your blog early this morning and mulled over its content all day at work. Used to love my job (teacher/32yrs/public school) until a series of administrators have decided to run the school like a corporation instead of a place to nurture the love of learning in kids. So last year I turned in my retirement papers effective June 2021.
Chris your words echo the soulless work culture that trades fortunes for passion and leave manu feeling hopeless.
It doesn’t have to be this way if you don’t want it to be.
This was book is excellent. A thoroughly enjoyable and informative read. I couldn’t put it down from start to finish. Thanks Chris.
When i see the Workbench. I see something else as well. Look at this and see if you see it (its a refectory table): https://www.earlyoakreproductions.co.uk/furniture/dining-tables/refectory-tables/product-451.php What I see in both cases is an aesthetic: solid, weighty, reliable, permanent. But what i see in the workbench is an updated way of achieving these same goals with cheaper wood and lamination. You may have built a workbench, but you may also have opened up a new way to build weighty tables and perhaps chairs (wainscot chairs?). Ok, i’ll go get tested for drugs & coronavirus…
Hey! Finally something in common with you. I was an overcooked baby, too. Coming out of there is one of my greatest regrets in life.Mind you, I’ve been trying to get back there for years.
Incredibly strong reactions to this article here and many of these are quite sad.How many of us are there who think of ourselves as shit parents? I think the reality probably is that we did what we could do ( at the time) with whatever we had. If it wasn’t good enough, well, too bad- it’s over to the next generation.
Thank you Chris for helping me wipe the fog off my glasses so I can see clearly now.
So many parallels to my experience in corporate life and the fear of losing my job. So much so that I also slowly built up a part-time woodworking business and studied woodworking in my off hours. Three downsizings later, 3 attempts at re-invigorating my hi-tech career and I finally threw the towel in and turned to woodworking as my new career. You know what, I have absolutely no regrets and kick myself for not having done it sooner. In retrospect, the journey was amazing, so much so that I wrote my own book about it. From Hi-Tech to Lo-Tech: A Woodworker’s Journey. Today, I preach this to anyone that is tired of their current career and pining to make a change. BTW, how is this for coincidence. I worked at Data General from 1980-1986 and idolized the MV/8000 team (Eagle) and was one of the first technical people trained on the powerful MV/8000. Amazing fact that Tom West was your uncle! I completely relate to your journey. Cheers, Norman Pirollo
Hi Chris,
This might be the best most heartwarming article you have written. Thank you.
I will pass along an insight. I got a Ph.D in chemistry (that and a nickel ….) and have worked for 22 years in the biotech/pharma industry. It is a good career and I like it; much like I enjoy woodworking in the evenings and on weekends, Typically I was rated as “fully meets expectations” and sometimes I got “exceeds expectations”; I wasn’t willing to work on weekends or late into the evenings to rate better. I am a solid employee and good at what I do and my bosses (with the exception of one or two) have really liked having me work for them.
Having said that, I have had almost no job stability in my career despite strong demand for my skills and multiple offers when I look. I had one job that lasted 9 years; one that lasted 3 years. The remaining 10 years of work have been by jobs that have lasted two years or less mostly due to companies going out of business or massive layoffs. I’m not bragging. Just want to point out that job stability is an illusion.
It has forced me to be a saver (similar to what Dave Ramsey teaches) and have a back up career (teaching college chemistry).
Sincerely,
Joe
Hi Chris,
Somehow I knew in my heart that this beautiful story would finally see the light.
Although, I had seen you a few times at woodworking events, we had no real opportunity to talk.
Two winters ago in Chicago, we talked briefly about our common link at the hospital there. I mentioned to you that I picked up hints, here and there, of your direction. I did not know if you would be offended. You gracefully acknowledged my thoughts.
I appreciated that connection.
Lastly, every time this hobbyist uses her lump hammer, that short moment comes to mind.
Regards
Chris, sometimes your writing rings a bell with me, and sometimes it doesn’t. This one was five by five right down the pipe. Take it from a fellow corporate renegade(dropped out before I was 40), humble student in the wood arts and a past caregiver to a dying father, good one amigo.
Thanks dude. Making sanity of chaos and cracking a few jokes along the way.
Yep, there’s a reason so many people read you, even beyond Roorkee chairs.
Keep going! Your dad would (and I’m quite sure of this) be proud.
My favorite chapter of this book – great story Chris
I’m not cr…
Ok. I’m crying.
sigh