Ah, the lovely smell of Christmas vegetable soup. It’s decadent aromas waft throughout my mother’s house, finding their way into each nook and cranny, lingering there for a moment, then moving on to remind someone else what day it is.

It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m sitting at the kitchen table here in Florence, drinking a cup of Starbucks Ubora. The coffee’s hot and the weather, while not exactly cold, is a bit nippy, as it should be two days after the winter solstice. The rain has stopped, thank goodness, and it looks like we’ll be having a traditional South Carolina Christmas. That means no snow, no real need for a jacket or coat, but at least the sky is bright.

I didn’t do what I intended this year, namely finishing a book I started over last year’s vacation, but I don’t think that matters anymore. My life has something of a mind of its own, and for that, I’m grateful. I’ve never been good at making my own decisions.

At the same time, I’ve got a headache.

Living alone, I don’t have to put up with noises that I don’t make, not for the most part, anyway. The dogs bark sometimes, but not much, and there’s nobody yelling at anybody in my little apartment. Here, visiting the family for the holidays, it’s different. They yell and scream about almost everything, and damn, they’re annoying.

I’ve been living alone for more than ten years now, and I’m just starting to realize how nice that is. I love my family, but if I hadn’t left when I did, I’m sure that I’d have lost my mind by now.

On the other hand, it’s starting to become time to make a new family. I’m sure that it’ll turn into something not so different than what this one is, but I can’t ay I’m dreading it. I think I’ll look forward to my own kids making noise, my own wife getting distraught and upset over little things, and the way that I’ll start playing some music just to drown out all of the din and confusion.

It sounds strange, I know, but I do want the hectic life that comes from being a husband and a father.

After nearly eight years in the telecommunications industry, it finally dawned upon me that we were beating a dead horse.  Phones are so 20th Century.  They’re dead technology.

Oh, wait.  The telephone is actually 19th Century technology, isn’t it?  Haven’t we been mucking about with the same basic principles for almost a hundred and fifty years?

So, like many people in my line of work, I started looking for something different.  I never played much with the telephones, anyway, barely ever learning how to transfer a call or dial into a conference bridge.  I was a server guy, particularly a UNIX server guy, and that only mattered to the world at large when they started falling apart.

As an aside, I happen to be really good at putting things back together when they’re falling apart, but for strange reasons known only to those guys even Satan fears called “Upper Management,” they decided that such duties were best left to poo-flinging monkeys instead of well-trained people, and I was relegated to an architecture role.  “Design it so it never breaks,” I was told, then got my wrist slapped when the works were gummed up with monkey poo.  Go figure.

Anyways, I started looking around.  What opportunities were out there for a really good server guy, where there could be exciting new technologies to work with?  There’s old tech, like Sun and IBM, and there’s Boom Tech, the companies who made it through the original Internet craze, like eBay and Yahoo!.[1]  Then there’s Google, who’s leading the way, and there’s a whole host of Silicon Valley startups again who are hot on the Google’s heels.  The problem is that none of these are out my backdoor.  I started looking into opportunities with companies like these, even went far into serious negotiations with eBay — I happened to be exactly the kind of guy they needed to come in and save their horrid system — but there was no way that I was going to move to San Jose.  There were other talks, too, but none of them worked out.

Then, it occurred to me.

Academia is a lot like working for a technology startup.  There is no limit to the number of interesting projects to work on.  The difference is that funding doesn’t tend to be a problem and you never have to worry about mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, or the deadpool.

It was with that in mind that I started talking to an old friend working at Clemson University.  A year and three days later, he finally worked through all of the red tape to offer me the position.  Today, I had my first day.

I can’t say for sure that starting a university job is all that different from starting a corporate job.  There was the same amount of paperwork to fill out, a blinding number of people to meet and names to remember, and all of the usual peculiarities like finding somewhere to sit, getting appropriate access, and setting up a new computer.  Something was different, though.  As much as I could tell that they were glad to have me here, none of them were overly excited as to be disingenuous.  There were no fake smiles, no pumped-up corporate attitude, no pep rally.  These people are just ready to get to work.  The bottom line here is to be innovative and get work done.  There are no sales people, no marketing departments, no corporate agendas.

I can tell I’ll like working here.  I’m sure that the work will be exciting.  In the coming days, I’ll be giving a little information on what I’m working on, but more importantly, I’ll be talking about the difference in structures and atmosphere.  This is a life that I think I can stick with for a long time.

[1]  What’s the proper way to punctuate a sentence that ends with a proper noun which just happens to itself end with a punctuation mark?  “Yahoo!” is the company’s full name, including the exclamation mark.  Did they ever think about how that makes grammar associated with their company look?  Even when it’s in the middle of a sentence, it looks ridiculous.