Interactions with God #82
When I left Sybase, I didn’t get a severance, but I did get a final commission check that would cover us for two months…just two months. Martha was a stay at home mom, so we had no other income. She had been home with the kids for years at this point.
My friend Rich had left Sybase the year before and joined Netscape. Netscape had been acquired by AOL. All AOL wanted was the Netscape internet browser. Netscape also had a bunch of enterprise business software. Sun Microsystems was interested in that.
You see, for years it had been widely known that a software sale will often influence a hardware sale. So, if Sun Microsystems, which sold computer servers, had access to the Netscape enterprise software, then they could greatly influence the hardware sale that would follow. Sun and AOL made an alliance. They called it iPlanet. It was a good idea, but to get the hardware sales reps to work with the software reps, well…that, would turn out to be much harder than they thought.
In early 2000, Rich was selling software training services for iPlanet. As I said, iPlanet was not a company. It was an alliance, one that was to last three years. Rich was an AOL employee working for iPlanet. Once he knew I was losing my job, he made a great effort to get me in the door. The mountain biking accident made this rather difficult.
When you are laid up for a few months from an injury, your lifestyle changes. You are not able to get around very well due to physical limitation and pain medication. Job interviews on Vicodin generally do not go very well. Sitting on your butt to heal, also does not help you pay your bills.
We did have the money for two months, but day by day, week by week, we watched it dwindle. In the second month (April), Rich had successfully gotten his manager, Howard, to consider me for a Training Sales Position at iPlanet.
Howard had set up a face to face interview after several phone interviews. I was to fly out from Phoenix and land in San Francisco. The iPlanet/Netscape corporate office was in Mountainview, CA. Having cut back on my intake of pain meds, I was finally able to drive again. I showed up at the airport and when I was ready to board my flight, they asked for my driver’s license. Yes, at that time, pre-911 you only needed to show an ID when you were about to board the plane. Only, I didn’t have it. I had forgotten my wallet completely!
Look, I know it was stupid. But, I had been sitting around for a month and a half in a stupor. I had not been carrying my wallet. Why would I? I wasn’t going anywhere. I just had gotten out of practice. Of course, they would not let me board the plane. I had to call Howard and let him know I would miss the flight that they paid for. Not good!
Howard was nice enough about it, but this action didn’t look good at all. When they decided to not reschedule the flight (and I said I would pay for it), I was really concerned. I had no other job prospects, nothing. It was now the middle of April and we were not going to be able to pay the mortgage and home expenses for May. I had just killed my family by doing something really stupid. I went home and fell on my face before God.
The next day, I spent more time in prayer. While doing so, a confidence arose in me. I got up and crafted a rather humorous email to apologize and ask for another chance. I sent it to Howard. Within a few minutes he had taken that email around to his boss, Jeff, and they laughed about it for a bit. They then called deciding to just do a group interview over the phone. A few days later, I got the job offer. I started work at iPlanet, as a Sun Microsystems employee on May 15th of 2000. By the time my first paycheck came we were just about to go late on the mortgage payment. The timing was amazing. Though we were not late on the mortgage, by the time I could pay it, I no longer had any fingernails to speak of…