THE JUMP

POSTED ON JULY 26, 2012 

THE JUMP

 An Andrew ramble

 “It’s a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, but few are chosen.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

Andrew Goldman, Asset Manager, ARCO Commercial Mortgage.  Oy Vey!  This is what I had become!  My wife always knew what I did, although she really didn’t “know” what I did for a living.  For that matter, I barely knew what I did.  Let’s just say that I sat in a grey cubicle, looked at a computer screen, and babysat large mortgages for commercial and multi-family real estate and leave it at that.  Any detailed explanation would work like extra strength Ambien on the casual reader.  I had been in this career limbo for too many years and I was in a real panic.  My kids were getting to the age when they start asking the ultimate loaded question. “Daddy, what is your job?”

Years earlier, I had promised myself that I would be able to answer this question with pride.  Sure, I wanted the kids to be able to understand my place in the world, but more important, I needed to fill the void that was my career identity.  I had drawn a line in the temporal sand to make this a reality prior to my fortieth birthday. Now the reality was that I might be answering this question with my usual mumbling nonsensical description of my daily dullness.  Only this time, I was going to have to provide an explanation to my kids. My kids were sure to be glazed over by this description.  Countless adults had previously turned into lobotomized zombies upon hearing my job duties.   Against all practicality I knew the time had come, I had to make “the jump”.

YOUR JOB SOUND TERRIBLY INTERESTING....REALLY!

For some reason I always had a knack for landing jobs that were tough to get regardless of the fact that nobody wanted them.  I made my first “jump” when I was twenty-three.  At that age it really couldn’t be called a “jump”, but being a typically self important 23 year old, I knew I was going places.  If only somebody would tell me where.  The feel good fantasy of my still pending “adult life” was about to get a knee to the testicles of reality.I try to forget how I wasted college with the ultimate “LA Law” delusion of becoming a career litigator.  Like the times, “Regan’s America”, it seemed to matter more how it sounded than how it executed.

Really, a Lawyer?  How do you do that?

Well, I guess I’ll go to college.  

Ok, what will you major in?

I hear Political Science is interesting.

Bad Idea!

So now I have this super cool Political Science degree and I really don’t feel like even applying to Law School.

You’re really screwed!

Maybe I can go to Washington and work as a Page on Capitol Hill or something like that?

You’ll probably just end up getting “bent over” by some slimy Christian Fundamentalist Congressmen from Alabama.

Well thanks, but no thanks, I guess I’ll see if I can work for my Dad until a position befitting a man of my experience, training, and education is thrust upon me.

POLITICAL SCIENCE, NOT THAT'S A MAJOR I CAN GET BEHIND!

Back to the “floor” I went.  (The floor was what carpenters and other laborers called the “work area” when we were remodeling a hospital, school, or some other public building.)  Despite telling myself that I shouldn’t be, I was actually happy in this work.  Dad even let me have a little “grey collar” work by going around to various city agencies for the purpose of examining upcoming projects and picking up blue prints and project specification books.  It was fun to walk around the city on days when I was not on the floor, but the more I ground through the river of “white collars” which ran at flood stage up, down, across, and under the streets of Manhattan, the more I knew one of these “important jobs” had to be for me.  After all, I just had to get into the mailroom and in no time I would have a corner office in one of the glass towers lining every street.  (a’ la Michael J. Fox in The Secret of my Success)

80'S UNREALITY

So what did you do? Now I had a plan.  First, get away from working for daddy.  It didn’t matter that I liked it, only losers worked for their dads.  So after demanding a substantial raise that the old man would never agree to, I walked out.  (Thank God he went along with letting me collect unemployment.)  Now all I had to do was take my newly acquired 386 PC and dot matrix printer (set to fine, of course) and start the Sunday through Tuesday routine of cutting out classified ads and sending along my mass-produced resumes and cover letters.  And whadda know, it worked.  In about 3 months I was working for a Savings and Loan as an REO Manager.  (Don’t ask, it involved foreclosing on people’s homes…truly the Lords work!) As I said, it was hard to get the job, they paid me shit, the work sucked, and my boss was a Nervous-Nelly-Douche-Bag.  It took me all of about two months to completely detest the job.

I stayed there for 5 years. Naturally!

Well at least you learned a lot and got some great experience.

No and…no.

It was during this time that I started to fall back on a little weekend remodeling work.  It was a lot different from what I had learned working on the floor, being residential and not commercial work, but it was similar enough to be in my “comfort zone” and strangely enough, it was work I liked although I still would never admit it to myself.

Now I’m married, my wife is pregnant, and being an REO Manager just ain’t going to feed the baby.  So I take my Compaq laptop, sign onto AOL via my one phone line, and look up The New York Times Classifieds.  (I was pretty cutting edge)  I start the resume flood again, and I got a hit.  A guy named Yogush Yousi calls me.  I can’t understand a word he is saying through his thick Indian accent.  Somehow I decipher that Yogush is based in California, but he has a opening in the Hoboken office of their commercial mortgage company for an Asset Manager position and he wants me to meet a guy named John Hanson.  What the hell, I go.  John was not John.  John was Gilbert from The Revenge of the Nerds, right down to the glasses, Members Only jacket and every pair of his pants being floods, except that John had zero personality to boot.  Perfect for mortgage banking.  So after 3 months and 5 interviews, I am offered the job.  I still have no idea what the job is, or what it entails, but I accept.  At the end of the first day, I realized I hated this job.  By the end of the first week, I despised it.  By the end of the first month I was going to leave regardless of the cost.

I ENJOY PAPERWORK

So you got the hell out of there and found something else?

Not exactly.

You stayed with the company but transferred into a different position?

No that’s not it.

You stayed and got some great experience.

I wouldn’t call it great.

But you stayed?

10 friggin years!

The job was dull, the money was fair at best, the work was nonsensical, and my boss was a passive dweeb.  I went nowhere.  I filled a lot of file cabinets with reports on properties and loans that nobody would ever read.  I analyzed property financial statements, sent deferred maintenance letters, tracked escrow accounts, and “rotted on the vine.”  Life went on, got a house, then two more sons.  Even got a dog and a car I liked for once.  All this time I continued to work on the weekends finishing basements, flooring houses, installing doors, replacing windows and siding, tiling bathrooms, etc.  As always, my gut continued to tell me I was in the right place.  All the while I continued to ask myself,  “What are you going to do for a career?”  This is a tough question to be asking when you start getting into your late thirties.  I couldn’t accept the answer for a long time because that 23 year old moron was still a small part of who I was, and he wouldn’t let me pull the trigger and make “the jump”, but every year my boys were getting older and 40 was getting closer.  It was then that something truly wonderful happened.

One day I was thinking back to the weekly car rides I took with my dad.  (Children of divorce have a lot of weekend commute time when mommy lives in Maywood, NJ and Daddy lives in Warwick, NY.)  I was thinking about all the talks the two of us would have on these Friday and Sunday night rides.  Then one of the conversations jumped out at me, and started playing over and over in my head until I had no choice but to finally listen to what it was telling me.  Its message was the death knell for my 23-year-old moron self.  His death came at the hands of the 10 year old Andrew with the memory of this simple exchange:

Andrew, do you ever think about what you want to do when you grow up?

Yes

Well what is it?  What do you want to do?

I’d like to be a Carpenter.

These days my job is literally backbreaking.  The money is still just fair.  The work is not always steady and I worry more than ever about earning a living.  And yet, I love what I do.  (Only a madman would be a General Contractor otherwise.)   Sure years were wasted, but these years also taught me this simple truth; Do what you wanted to do when you were 10 years old and you will never go wrong.

~