Personal Lore: 2013-15
Trigger Warning: Suicide
I returned home from serving a full time 2 year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in 2013. I didn’t have a lot going on or other aspirations. The Nexus 4 was cool. My family moved to Texas shortly before I went on my mission so I left and returned mostly to a strange place. I’ve only lived there for less than a year total. About a month after being home, my Dad called me and my brothers to let us know he decided he was going to take his own life and he was going to come visit us one last time. Strange. He was living in Las Vegas, Nevada at the time. While he was visiting us, he decided he actually did not want to take his own life any more, so I decided to hitch a ride back to Vegas with him.
I had two 18-gallon totes. One of them was filled with Gameboys and Nintendo’s. The other was filled with my clothes. I had less than $100, no credit card. We got back to Vegas and he decided his next move was to pack up his apartment and storage unit and move to Salt Lake City, Utah, where his (evidently estranged) wife was living. So we did that and got to SLC. I had a mattress on the floor of their 2 bedroom apartment but it was relatively downtown so I had a lot of fun illegally riding Trax into the city to see what was what. I had some friends in that area that were really gracious and entertained me faithfully. We went to Park City and saw Toots and the Maytals. I went to a “show” in an abandoned factory/venue that was called “The Pickle Factory” and it was a pop punk band and a mathcore screamo band. I found the greatest jacket of my life at the thrift store.
Things between my Dad and step mom were deteriorating so I made a few asks in desperation. I could always go home to my mom’s house in Texas, but that was lame to me. I had been talking with a girl that seemed interested in me and our common location was St. George, Utah so I decided that’s where I needed to be next. I called a family member that owned a vacation home, asked if I could stay there while I got a job and figured things out. No (with prejudice). I next asked an absolute saint of a woman, the mother of my High School girlfriend, if I could stay with her. She said “yes” with no hesitation. She said I might need to help pay for groceries. I told her I’d eat ramen till I figured it out and she said that was good.
I’m sure there were other paths that could have been taken, but that is a definitive case where one individual who had no obligation to me whatsoever changed not only my life, but the lives of my wife and children, forever.
As it turned out my Dad needed to be back in Vegas for a court hearing so I hitched a ride with him and on his way back home he dropped me off in St. George. He said he didn’t really need his vehicle any more since he was in SLC now, so he offered to let me drive his truck until I got my own ride. He took a Greyhound back to SLC.
At this point, it was roughly March-April of 2013. Things were really looking up. I still didn’t have any money, but I had a tote full of Gameboys and somehow that felt like enough. I started aggressively networking with my old school peers and was able to land a job at a car wash. I had the job of pressing the button depending on which wash they bought, and I also got to pressure wash the bugs off the front bumper. If it was slow, I had a chair and could sit down. But the best part: I had unlimited access to the soda fountain. So I would sit there drinking soda, pressure washing, it was bliss.
After about a week and a half of that, my good friend to this day Colton let me know the third party Apple retailer he was working for was hiring. It was a sales/customer service position. I applied and got the job. It paid less than the car wash, but it was a lot more interesting and engaging to me. Weirdly enough their first step was to send me up to SLC for a week of training at corporate headquarters. Put me up in a hotel, I think maybe meals. I was a king. While I was up there I met my Dad at a Burger King somewhere downtown for dinner.
Things with the girl seemed to be going well and fast, we decided to get engaged. The job didn’t pay great but it was fun and I was good at it. After a month battle with mononucleosis (surely unrelated to the girl), one day I got a call from my little brother than our step brother had just called him and let him know that our Dad had taken his own life. Sometime in May, I do not recall the date. He left a “holographic will” (death note) naming me the executor of his estate. Now what exactly does that mean I ask you? I don’t know.
We went up to SLC for the funeral and to clear out a storage unit my Dad had decided to dedicate the last few weeks of his life to cramming as much random crap into as was scientifically possible. He literally had two pottery kilns. To my knowledge he never touched clay in his life. We hauled all the crap to St. George into my Grandparents winter home’s garage and over the next few months my now fiancee sold and distributed the random crap. Gave us a meager nest egg to start our lives. Plus, I still had the truck which had no title and expired registration at this point.
We got married in July and moved into a 400 square-foot (37 square meters) home. The rent was $300 but the utility bill was $150 because it only had window A/C units and St. George is “hot as balls” as we say here. Still, on a minimum wage, we made it work. My wife finished her student teaching which was full time and unpaid and by the time she was done in December, we were out of money. I think there was only 1 time I thought we wouldn’t have enough for rent, but something worked out.
My GitHub account was created on December 20, 2013. I have another great friend, Nate, who was smart enough to get a job at a local small Ruby on Rails dev shop. He suggested I should apply since he could distinctly recall me recompiling the Linux Kernel in Middle School. I had some paid development experience, but not very much. Just random sites I built in High School. I went in for the interview and the dudes seemed overall impressed with me, but just needed something more substantive to hire me on. I spent a little time on some Ruby tutorials, “Rails for Zombies” (iykyk [I actually personally thanked Gregg at Vue Conf 2018]), but really I was so broke that I had an old AMD chip my friend gave me out of pity and literally the cheapest case, 32GB SSD, a trash 720p TV I inherited from my Dad. No GPU. I ran Lubuntu on that bad boy and I cracked my neighbor’s WEP key because I didn’t even have a home internet connection. Needless to say, on top of working full time in a retail customer service job during the holidays, I did not have much energy to learn programming.
One evening, maybe in January 2014, one of the founders of the dev shop came into the Apple retailer and asked me why he hadn’t heard back from me. I gave him the same rundown I just gave you. I said, if you’d just pay me minimum wage, I know I can learn enough to be useful quickly. He said done. Wow! A little bit later, he came back in and bought a top of the line 15” Macbook Pro. I rang him up, charged him, and then he slid it back over the counter and said “Okay, see you when you start!” It was not only the first Apple product I had ever owned personally, but the most expensive. My coworkers were aghast. My manager said “That’s nicer than the computer I have.”
It’s hard to really put into words what that laptop gave me, but I think you probably can understand. It’s like a freedom, unlimited potential. Like an infinite block of the finest marble, waiting to be chiseled infinitely.
I worked there for the next year. It was good, and it was really hard. The overwhelming dread of having a task assigned and having literally no clue where to even begin. We’ve all felt it. But I had a private office with a desk and a door that shut, and a window. I watched birds play on my windowsill. It was a small shop and a great environment for learning. I owe a debt of gratitude to those folks! I am professionally employed developing Ruby on Rails to this day.
2014 was a great year, really. That first year of marriage is always rough but looking back it was like crying over spilled milk. You live and learn. I worked my way up to $15 an hour at that job. I thought for sure it would be a while before I made that much money again. However, I felt like I needed to go to college to become an Electrical Engineer so I could design circuit boards. We were also expecting our first baby. I applied to Brigham Young University for the winter 2015 semester and I was accepted. I wrapped things up with that job, left on really great terms with them, and packed up and moved to Provo, Utah BYU married student housing. 800 sq. ft. that truly felt like a mansion. Plus, rent included Gigabit internet. In 2015 that was pretty crazy!
I’ll leave the lore here for now. BYU was a trip and I can’t wait to tell you about it.