My Worst Job Interview Ever

We've all had some bad job interviews. I have gone through at least two periods in my life where I was without a job (once out of college and once when I quit my worst job ever) and I was more prepared and applied for jobs that were more appropriate the second time, as opposed to when I was looking for a job fresh out of college. I've shown up to interviews very prepared, not so prepared, hungover and feeling great. I have had two shitty, shitty interviews that don't qualify as my worst interviews ever. Both involved selling products door-to-door, when the job posting indicated something completely different from what the interview involved. Both interviews involved me shadowing a person for an entire day (yes, the entire day and I walked around in dress shoes all day too) and in one interview I sold door-to-door in Fayetteville, North Carolina and the other interview I went from Charlotte back to my hometown 10 miles from Charlotte and sold door-to-door in a neighborhood where I knew people. By the way, at the end of both of these interviews I told my would-be supervisor in that position I would rather be unemployed than work for them. Of course, both would-be supervisors reminded me what a mistake I was making. Of course, I didn't make a mistake and can't even remember the names of each company. I'm sure they are still out there trying to get energetic college graduates to work for them in some bizarre pyramid scheme.

But my worst job interview also happened to be one of my shortest job interviews. I don't remember the company, but I do remember it was an insurance firm and I was applying for a more junior managerial role at that firm. I had graduated from grad school in May and it was September and I wanted a job. I was looking at the all the popular sites on a daily basis and even had the Fortune 500 list bookmarked and went through 100 of those companies everyday to where I was looking at those companies for jobs once a week. So I found this job I thought I might apply for through one of these sites. It dealt with numbers, didn't seem like it involved too much sales, and it was a semi-managerial position. So I applied for it, and as I was want to do, promptly forget the specifics of the job as I went searching for the hundreds of other jobs available in the hopes someone would hire me so I could start living my life.

A week later or so, I got a phone call from this insurance firm and they wanted me to come in for an interview. I looked back at the spreadsheet I kept of jobs I applied for with the job description included. I was surprised because I did feel like it was a bit of a reach for me to even get a call in response to my application since I didn't have prior work experience in the field, but it was a pleasant surprise. So I studied up on the company, learned more about the position, got my questions ready and didn't stay out too late with my friends the night before. I was prepared. I woke up the next morning and drove to downtown Raleigh to the interview.

The office was full of dark wood panels. That's all I remember. The wood paneling was really dark and the reception area wasn't huge. I checked in with receptionist and within probably 15 seconds a gentleman came out and introduced himself and brought me back to his office. He was a middle-aged white man (I know, a shock, right?) dressed in a shirt and tie. Pretty standard look and he had the corner office with a nice view of the street through some trees. He was a cliche. He sat me down and that's where the fun began. I remember most of the conversation, which isn't hard since I was there for maybe five minutes. And I promise, I am not making his tone and antagonism up.

(Guy...in a very loud tone that appears to try and sound threatening...it's a standard dominant-male-trying-to-intimidate-to-see-what-you-are-made-of act) "Tell me about yourself."

(Me, knowing this is always the first question asked is ready to nail this question) "Well...(I start the whole spiel about my background and then he interrupts)"

(Guy) "No, specifically why did you apply for this job?"

(Me) "I thought the job description sounded interesting and I have a background in with finance and money, so I was hoping it would be a field I could be interested in developing a career in."

(Guy) "Well, what do you know about the field?"

(Me) "I know the insurance field isn't easy and that a lot of success depends on keeping good relations with your customers and always acquiring new customers to keep the business growing."

(Guy...I realize now his tone isn't supposed to be threatening, but he's essentially fucking with me...he's antagonizing me and I had no idea why) "My job. What do you know about my job?"

(Me...looking at my notes) "I don't think I'm applying for your job, am I?"

(Guy...smiles condescendingly) "No, you are not. But tell me what you think I do on a daily basis, from the time I walk in the office until the time I leave."

(Me...in a tone that is meek, because I need a job...these cigarettes and alcohol aren't going to pay for themselves) "I have no idea what you do on a daily basis from when you walk in until you leave during the day. I'm eager to know, which is why I'm here to see if we are a good fit."

(Guy...asking the questions in a tone that I now see isn't confrontational or antagonizing necessarily, but he brought me here to tell me how I am underqualified for the job) "We aren't a good fit. But do tell me what you think I do on a daily basis."

(Me...I'm defeated at this point, but I keep going...) "Okay, when you get in at 8am you...(I go through a list of what I think he does, which based on the fact I had never worked in the office was obviously completely incorrect)

(Guy shake his head at me) "All wrong. I come in early every morning before 8am (I should have stood up and given him applause I guess), look at my agenda for the day, plan my client meetings, plan at least two hours (and he puts up two fingers as if I would fail to understand what "two" means) for additional phone calls, have meetings with staff members and get updates on how the business is going. I leave after 5pm everyday."

(Me...not giving up) "And those are all things I would like to do in the future---"

(Guy) "Not here you won't. Why would you apply for a job you aren't even qualified for? Why would you waste my time and have me interview you when you have no idea what I do and what the position calls for?"

(Me...done giving up giving up) "In fairness, I have no prior work experience outside of work done during summers in high school and college, so I don't know what any job consists of because I haven't been given a chance to learn. I can't get job experience until I'm given a chance to do a job. Also, I don't think I applied for your job."

(Guy) "Yes, but this is a job that requires someone who has experience. It said on the posting it takes 3-5 years experience (which is something I knew at the time is just put on there to get more qualified candidates to apply and I know that now too when I interview people and put "3-5 years experience" on the job posting) and you march in here with zero years experience. You need to reconsider your job search and start applying for jobs that you are qualified for and not waste anyone else's time."

(Me) "You didn't have to interview me and you chose to."

(Guy) "Start applying for entry level jobs you are qualified for and don't waste anyone else's time. Do you have any more questions for me?"

(Me...I did have questions for him, probably a thousand, but wanted to leave ASAP) "No."

(Guy shakes my hand and lets me out of his office) "Good to meet you and good luck."

I drove home laughing because this guy called me into his office simply to antagonize me for applying for a job. He wasted his time to berate me for wasting his time. It seemed sort of unnecessary. I would have gotten the message by never receiving a phone call for an interview.

When I got back, my roommate who did have the experience required, heard the story as we sat by the pool and said he was going to apply for the job and then go in and mess with the guy (he had a job pretty much guaranteed to him by his old company once he graduated from graduate school so he had nothing to lose). He never did that of course, which is probably a good thing.

To this day, this is my worst interview. Probably even worse than the interview where a second interview was supposed to be scheduled for 4pm and they called me at 8am to see if I could make a 9:15am interview instead. I wanted the job, so I took the interview. I had been out the night before very late and I was a zombie at the interview and did not get the job. It was probably my terrible ability to recall facts and the fact I wanted to sleep and not talk that set me back. Regardless, I still don't know why this insurance guy called me into his office just to berate me for applying for the job. Who does that?

My Worst Job Ever

We've all had jobs that we have hated or couldn't wait to quit in protest (I think...I have a friend who got a job out of college with his father's company making six figures where he works four days a week...so maybe there are exceptions). The job I had that was my worst job, and I even knew it at the time, went from January 2006-December 2006. Well, actually I only worked from March 2006-December 2006, but I had to study for financial tests, as well as prepare for my new job and chose to quit my previous job to focus on my new job and studying for the tests. The worst job I ever had was in the financial services industry. Not a boiler room or anything like that, but sort of a more low-key boiler room with a financial company that isn't Edward Jones, Prudential or Charles Schwab, but competes against them. The job sucked and was a time drain, as well as a drain of a lot of money out of my pocket. Here's how my worst job ever came to be.

I was working as a manager in a retail job, which I actually enjoyed fairly well. The only parts I didn't enjoy were the hours (if it weren't for the hours I would have stuck around) that entailed me working until 2am some nights and getting up at 4:30am during the week when I had to work early. I've never had much of a set sleep schedule, but I couldn't do this for long. It just threw me off. I also didn't enjoy unloading trucks and being on my feet all day. It wasn't a great job and I would come home exhausted from walking around and lifting shit all day. I'm not lazy, trust me, but I like to go to the gym for fun and don't want my life to be one big visit to the gym. Plus, I missed having weekends. Weekends are important to me.

So I decided I was going to look for another job and I did. I found a financial firm that was hiring (as all financial firms are at all points during the year...which is something I didn't know at the time) and went in for an interview. It sounded good. I'm a people person, I got most of my weekends back and I had no girlfriend and no reason to not work long hours. As I said repeatedly at the time when I asked why I took the job, "What else do I have better to do?" I thought it would work out in the end. Just a note, if your reasons for taking a job encompass the following four reasons:

1. I don't like my current job.
2. What else do I have to do?
3. I have no girlfriend.
4. It will work out in the end.

Do not take that job. Just don't. If only I could give myself this advice before I wasted a year of my time. So I quit my current job, went to the pre-job training sessions (another red flag) with this financial services firm, and spent most of my time trying to pass the four exams required to get licensed. I also hung out, drank and partied with my friends during this time, which was by far the coolest part of studying for licensing exams. I also spent time putting out fish bowls (yes, actual plastic fishbowls) at restaurants for reasons I will explain in a minute. I had seven restaurants when I started my with this financial services firm and felt pretty good about myself for that. So I started my new job in March of 2006 very pleased with how very pleased I was. It did not last long.

So let me get these fishbowls out of the way first. I have to explain this. The marketing plan for this financial services firm, the entire marketing plan other than to go to your "natural market" (which is a polite way of saying "Call your family"...which I will get to in a minute) was to put fishbowls out at restaurants where people could put their business card in there and win a free lunch. It's no scam, I had a budget for $10/person that I got reimbursed for these free lunches. They ate, I spoke for five minutes about investments, etc and then got the fuck out of there to let them eat. I of course gathered their personal information so I could call them later to see if they were interested in talking more in-depth about these investments. I was up front that I would be calling them. Again, it wasn't a scam and I got reimbursed at $10/person. The problem is that outside of saying "Call your family," this was the ONLY marketing this company was capable of supporting. Oh sure, there were other things you could do, but you had to run it by corporate and then get all this other bullshit completed in order to get your alternative marketing event (that's what it was called, as if any idea outside of "Put a bowl in a restaurant so someone can put a business card in there and then you can hassle them for a few months over the phone" was just so crazy it needed more time to be dwelled upon) approved. It wasn't worth it and took time with no guarantee it would work. Oh, we also went to Costco every Saturday to offer free $20 gift cards for giving out personal information to us so we could stalk you by phone. That's really what it was, stalking. So I lied, there were three marketing techniques this company had. Marketing savants they were not.

The problem with these lunches is I would create a specific menu everyone could eat off of so I could stay under budget and my $10/person limit included tip and drink. So at some restaurants where people who earn more money chose to eat lunch, I would have to dip into my pocket and pay out of my pocket for lunches I wasn't getting reimbursed on. These are the type of people you want as clients, people who have money. I needed these types of people as customers so if they act like dicks and choose to order off the main menu then I could swallow it and pay out of pocket or refuse to pay and ruin any slight chance I had at gaining their business. Since money was made off gaining business, I often swallowed my anger and just paid out of pocket for lunches that were over $10 per head. This led to a lunch I had with the assholes from the North Carolina Education Lottery. These assholes were notified by phone that I had a special menu they could eat off and that is what they could order on the menu for lunch and they could not order dinner for lunch. I was taking them to a local restaurant here in Greensboro that sold ribs and steak for lunch and dinner. The person who dropped the business card in the fishbowl stated she understood. Spoiler alert: She ignored this and requested all 15 of the people who came to lunch get a full menu. The waitress obliged. I told the waitress this isn't how it works and the asshole lady who dropped the business card explained this was the deal and I am liar. I could not have been more clear that there was a special menu when we set the lunch up. I even had it written on the piece of paper I sent out confirming the lunch time. Because I was a wimp, I said "Fine" and then EVERY SINGLE PERSON AT THE TABLE ordered steak, except for the asshole lady who dropped the business card who ordered steak AND ribs. She took some home for dinner, of course. My bill for 15 people came to around $300, which means I just spent $150 to take a bunch of assholes from the North Carolina Education Lottery out to lunch. By the way, they all gave me fake numbers. This was towards the end when I decided I was quitting, but let me go back to the beginning again.

Okay, so if I did get a person to drop a card in the fishbowl and took them to lunch, I would get their personal information, then I would call and stalk them. This is the point where I stopped becoming everybody's lunch bitch and became a motherfucking telemarketer. I'm not sure if this is a bump up or a bump down. I hated this, but it was part of the job. Before every phone session which went by this schedule (and this schedule was not fucked with...you don't eat, you don't piss, you do nothing but "smile and dial" with the leads from your lead box*):

Monday: 5pm-8pm
Tuesday: 9am-11am
Wednesday: 2pm-5pm
Thursday: 4pm-8pm
Friday: 2pm-5pm
Saturday: 9am-12pm

*By the way, this "lead box" was part of what happened sometimes called "a lead box audit" where my vice president would go through my leads and tell me which ones I should get rid of and which ones I should keep. Guess what? I never was told to get rid of any leads, even some five years old or more, and this "lead box audit" only served the purpose to ensure that leads weren't being fabricated by the advisors using their own handwriting to put down fake numbers and names. I can't emphasize enough how much I would never encourage someone to work for this financial services company. 

That's a lot of talking on the phone and to this day I still hate talking on the phone. There were "warm-ups" before you spoke on the phone, because we were all morons who couldn't talk on the phone without warming up, for 10 minutes and then the calls began. I asked one time, as I am want to do, why it is if a person says they aren't interested we don't hang up. I was told they may be interested if they hear more, which never made sense to me. Personally, I always know if I'm interested in something and if I say I'm not interested then I'm not interested. But again, for the sake of sales I had to assume every human I spoke to was a drooling moron. If I happened to get someone on the phone and they agreed to come in and talk to me, that was a good thing. Of course people didn't show up sometimes and then there would be a long discussion about my "show rate" which means I didn't close them well enough on the phone to get them into the building to speak with me. Since it's my job to control the universe and the people in the universe and all. Because it's entirely fair to blame me when someone tells me they aren't interested in my services, I convince them they are interested and then they decide later they really aren't interested. I'm sure there's a science to getting people to show up for appointments I didn't care to understand. If your show rate wasn't good, then it became a problem that involved sitting down and talking about it. It's sales and how sales go. Sometimes people show up, sometimes they don't. I'm too logical and it didn't make sense to me to talk about why people didn't show up to meet with me and it became something I was doing wrong in closing them. People have minds they make up no matter how convincing I am. That's my position.

So before they came in to see me I had to get that person in to speak with me on the phone to get them interested in seeing me. Sometimes they came to meet me. That's great, right? People like me in person generally. I'm pretty casual and say what I think or mean. So what this financial services company did was take away all of my likeability in favor of a 4 page document we had to memorize and were tested on (yes, tested on it) to make sure we had it memorized. Then I would give this speech to every client who met with me in an effort to remove any likeability I had and make me sound like a robot. This document served as an introduction to me, what would be discussed when I met with the client and would take up to 10 minutes to go through. So all likeability has been ripped from me and I'm now a robot. When I pointed out to my vice president part of my likeability is that I speak off the cuff and think on my feet, it was explained to me the script works. I asked if they had never not used the script and they said it was handed down from corporate and was proven to work. Showing I was quick on my feet, I pointed out this meant they probably had not tried an alternative method and so they can't say for sure the script works better than another method. This did not endear me to my vice-president.

Let me get to the hierarchy of this financial services company for a second. I had a vice-president who was in charge of the office, a mentor who was over me and a few other employees and would listen to us and advise us, as well as a coach who was in meetings with me at the beginning. Quite the hierarchy. So I had three people on my ass at all times preaching the gospel of bullshit the company was peddling. It made Scientology look loose and non-rigid in comparison.

So I had a script I hated and that ruined all likeability. I was doing well otherwise. I rolled over a little short of $2 million into the company in my first few months and this was proof that what they were doing worked. What my coach and all of the other parts of the hierarchy didn't know is I didn't use their stupid fucking script when I was alone in a meeting and told the people at my lunch that there was a short scripted beginning and then we would talk candidly. Yeah, I'm not good with being told what to do. So who knows what worked, but if I told my coach/mentor/VP what I was doing, it would have gotten shut down so I had to let them think their process was working. It's hard being a passive-aggressive rebel. So many compromises to make.

Also, we were fee-based financial advisors. So if someone wanted to work with me, they had to pay $500 up front. Yeah, no one wants to do that, which made my job hard. When I pointed out that we are collecting $500 and giving up potentially thousands of dollars this fell on deaf ears. This is the type of company that would break their arm jumping on the concrete to grab a quarter. Sure, you have to pay doctor bills, BUT YOU HAVE A QUARTER! I had so many clients who couldn't give me $500 but wouldn't mind investing with me. I couldn't take their investments because the industry was going towards fee-based advising, so of course it made sense to pass up thousands of dollars to have $500 for sure in your pocket.

My rollovers and clients stopped for a period through the summer because I no longer gave a shit. I wasn't in fear of being fired (you have to bring in a certain amount over a specific time frame or you will be fired) because my numbers were still high. I didn't like the hours I was working (which was from 8am-8pm Monday through Thursday, 8am-5pm on Friday, and Saturday 9am-12pm, which didn't include appointments I set after hours) and frankly was tired of being told it was my business to run but couldn't run it how I wanted to. There's only so much, "It's your business, take control of it...but only how we tell you to take control of it" I could hear before I was going crazy. I had a Master's degree and had some ideas that just weren't going to work with corporate. The long hours sucked and I decided I needed to quit when I could. The problem is the money was still good and I didn't want to be unemployed. My girlfriend at the time (now my wife) thought I was crazy for even thinking of quitting without having another job. She would support the decision though. It wasn't time to quit though, because I enjoyed my co-workers and wasn't motivated enough to get past the hump of wanting to quit and actually doing it.

Then my tipping point came in a conversation I had with my vice-president. I was genuinely concerned I wasn't getting any accounts and went to him for advice. In the next hour he mapped out 200 people from my natural market I could contact. Again, the only marketing device they know of outside of doing lunches is "Call your friends." On this list included my best friend from grade school whose parents lived near my mother, but I had not spoken to him in 15 years. My girlfriend's father was on this list too. Because nothing says, "I really like your daughter" by hitting him for money. It all seemed pretty fucking ridiculous and it was at that point I realized these people have absolutely no clue how to help me. They don't know the job they claim to know. They don't know how to increase my sales other than to guilt those who love/like/know me into opening an account with me, and of course paying $500 to do so. I told my VP this was unacceptable. I had come to him for help and all he could do was try to get me to leverage my friends and family. That's not a solution and won't be a solution. I want to learn to sell and help people by gaining accounts, not use my family and friends to make me feel better about myself. He said something that I don't remember, but it wasn't helpful and involved cursing. He was a very persuasive guy, but I saw through him pretty quickly. He was full of shit. Once you understand he was full of shit, everything he said/did made sense. 

This was the end of summer. I waited another month to think about my decision and then told my girlfriend over lunch that I was quitting December 20 and going into "Operation Shutdown" until that time. I was going to do everything my way and spend the day away from the office (I usually had a lot of time during the week to go around and collect business cards from the fishbowls and search for new restaurants) not doing the two lunches per day, but doing 2-3 lunches per week. During the time I usually sat in the office and tried to get better at my job, I would be playing Playstation 2, eating lunch with my girlfriend, and going to the gym. I'm not sure she believed I was quitting December 20, but I don't bluff.

So for the next month, I refused to train any new employees on how to do lunches (yeah, I wasn't good enough to get accounts, but was good enough to do training...go figure) by thinking of reasons to get out of having new employees follow me to these lunches. I did anything I wanted to do and had not had time to do. I turned what was a 60-65 hour a week job into a 40 hour a week job where I wasn't tired and could be on top of my game when I did lunches and met with prospective clients. Around the end of October my numbers started getting better. I got an account a week for a month (which was pretty good) and was brought in to tell how I did it to new recruits. I preached the gospel I was told to preach...sort of. I did throw in a few of my own personal thoughts like instead of doing lunches five days a week, go eat with a loved one during one set day of the week. Needless to say, I was asked to not speak to the recruits again, even though at that point I was one of the better performers who had been there less than a year. I deviated from what they were being told about hard work, 60 hour weeks, and don't eat with loved ones but try to get their money instead.

I held back a little when speaking to these new recruits. I didn't want my VP or anyone else to know what I was really doing, because I wanted to drop my new business plan of working a 40 hour work week when I pretended to quit on December 1. Yes, I had a plan to pretend to quit just to see what the reaction would be. I had three goals in this pretending to quit meeting:

1. Make them concerned I was going to quit and have to worry about explaining why a high performer just was quitting while having no other job.

2. I wanted to see their reaction when I told them I was running my own business the way I wanted to. That I was spending company time working out, swimming, and eating lunch with my girlfriend. If they fired me, so be it. I was quitting anyway.

3. I wanted them to think they had talked me out of it for when I did quit on December 20, just to make the shock a little bit more severe. I also wanted to basically test the waters and didn't want to deal with them trying to talk me out of it once I did quit. Basically, since my VP/mentor/coach were all salesmen I wanted them to think they had sold me and used all of their ammo on why I shouldn't quit on December 1. I was interested to hear the bullshit, if I'm being honest. I would get all of their objections out of the way AND get amused at the same time.

I'm an asshole. I was tired of being used over long hours and treated like a moron (I am leaving out quite a few stories just for the sake of your eyes. You get the point. It sucked to work here), so I was going to get back at them in my own way. I like to fuck with people's heads and expectations, so I was going to pre-quit a few weeks before I really quit. I'm manipulative when I want to be and I really, really liked fucking with people.

Here's an example: I told my 8th grade history teacher I had an Uncle Shanks who was a Lumbee Indian. I went on and on about him when I had the chance to and my friends would assist me in pretending. This went on for a month or so until my history teacher invited him in to speak with the class. At that point, I had to admit I didn't have an Uncle Shanks who is a Lumbee Indian. She was too embarrassed to really tell anyone she had been long conned by a 13 year old. It was lying, but mostly I didn't like her and wanted to mess with her. My parents weren't really upset when I told them what I did. It was sort of a "Pooped in the fridge and ate an entire wheel of cheese" moment. I got a short lecture about not lying, but overall I think they were slightly impressed.

So moving up to December 1, I went into my mentor's office and said I was quitting. She called in the VP and that's when the fireworks started. He initially called me a "pussy" and said I was giving up. I told him I hated it there and would prefer to be unemployed then work 60-65 hours at a job. I then told him I was actually only working 40 hours and semi-explained what I was doing instead of doing lunches. He told me that they could dock my pay for not working the full hours. I pointed out to him under North Carolina law because I am not an hourly employee then I am not required to work a certain amount of hours. I'm salaried, so there's no pay to dock for not working a set amount of hours. He called me a "pussy" again and said that if he weren't my supervisor he would physically assault someone (like me, obviously) who did this for "using their privilege of independence" like this. I have a privilege of independence in his opinion. I always assumed I had a right to independence, but apparently within the confines of this job during the 60 hours I was there I did not.

(On a side note, I don't love my behavior here. I was tired, even working only 40-ish hours a week, and mentally beaten down. I felt like a prisoner and would never behave this way again. I would never act this way at my current job, mostly because I'm respected and treated like a human rather than a piece of meat who is only good for calling family and friends and begging for money from them...or at least begging for them to open an account with me for $500. I wouldn't call my behavior reprehensible, but again, there is more than just what I'm saying here that occurred during my year-long employment with this company. I wasn't a model employee at this stage, that I will admit)

This meeting lasted for a while and I explained to them why I was quitting and had stopped following "the plan," mostly because it was a waste of my time and they had no ideas to help me improve at the job, so I did what I thought I needed to and improved. I think the fact I improved without following "the plan" probably made my VP angrier than anything else. The job wasn't just about getting accounts, but not questioning "the plan" and being fully committed to what bullshit the company was peddling. I have a low threshold for bullshit, so I didn't buy into it completely. I also yearn to try something new when I'm told "This is the only way this can get done." I want to prove there is another way. The meeting started winding down and I again got called a pussy by my VP and I told him I wasn't being a pussy by creating my own hours, in fact that was pretty fucking ballsy.

So we went back and forth and I got called a few names and was accused of quitting (yep, they were pretty perceptive weren't they?) before I got a chance to get good at what I was doing. I told them I didn't think I could get good when I had leadership who believed my only chance of success was calling my natural market and trying to get them to spend $500 on an account. Finally, I had gotten what I wanted and said I would give it some more time while following "the plan," which was a complete lie. They clapped me on the shoulder and then my VP met with my mentor a few minutes and I could tell he was urging her to give me special attention for a while. So my little stunt ended up with my mentor following me around for an entire week, which really ruined the whole "I'm only working 40 hours per week" thing. Fortunately, my mentor was useless and couldn't take a piss without permission from the VP, so I simply had a shadow and didn't have someone wasting my time by trying to improve my business.

Regardless, on December 19 I brought a box into work and packed up all of my shit and left the office at my usual 8pm. I got home and my roommate and I laughed for quite a while about how I carried a box of my possessions out of the office, had an empty desk and no one even asked me what was going on. My plan for the next day was coming in and while the office was having "a class" from 8am to 9am that the VP was teaching, leaving my resignation note and then leaving. So I walked in on December 20, got a cup of coffee, walked into my mentor's office and told her this was my official resignation and to have a good life. She said, "No, wait until Mike (that was the VP) gets out of the class and then we can all talk this through." I told her we had talked previously and there was nothing left to talk about at this point. She again urged me to wait for Mike (mostly because she was a useless drone who couldn't speak unless our VP put words in her mouth for her) and I declined, then walked out of the building. I was done, thank God.

I went home and immediately started looking for a new job. I feel sympathy for my wife's parents. We had just started dating less than six months before and now she has to tell them I just quit my job and am going to be looking for another job. I'm sure they thought she was dating a real winner. To their credit, they held their tongue around me. It's just so happens I met my wife at a very transitional point in my career. But man, I can imagine the conversations her parents had about me just walking out on a job. It took me a couple of months to find a job. I looked everyday and interviewed at probably every financial firm in Greensboro/Winston-Salem and at every bank in Greensboro/Winston-Salem. I was attractive to banks because I had my licensing for the Series 7 and Series 66, as well as my long-term care and insurance license. I could peddle all sorts of products, and that's all they wanted me to do, peddle products. I wanted a non-sales job in a bank or with a financial company and those did not exist for me. My background pushed them towards wanting to push me towards the sales part of their company.

It wasn't until I interviewed with a State Farm representative who wanted me to run the insurance portion of the company that I realized I needed to stop interviewing for jobs I didn't want. Seems easy, right? Interview for jobs you want, not jobs you don't want. The problem is there is a certain comfort in interviewing for a job and a certain discomfort in not getting any interviews. I could get interviews with financial services companies and had trouble getting interviews outside of that industry. It's natural to keep getting interviews and praying this company will be different. So I quit my job on December 20 and I didn't find a job I wanted to take until the middle of March. It felt like years. What I did was start over. Just start completely over. I had a Master's Degree, but really had no idea what I wanted to do. So I signed up with the best temp agency I could find at a job fair here in Greensboro and told them to just work my ass off. Give me jobs and I will do them. I figured somewhere in there I would find a permanent job or something I like. For the first time in my professional career, I was right.

I spent a couple of days in my first temp gig working with a British consultant for a local company combing through thousands of documents that I'm still not exactly sure what I was looking for. He seemed pleased with my work, but it was mind-numbing. In fact, worse than mind-numbing. It was reading multi-colored Excel spreadsheets line-by-line looking for discrepancies. The good news is I got paid. The bad news is I think I went blind for a few days. Then I got fortunate. A hiring manager at RFMD who hired temps through the temp agency I worked with saw I went to Appalachian State and as a graduate from Appalachian State wanted to know why I was unemployed and looking for work. We had a phone conversation and he agreed I could be a "Supply Chain assistant" or something to that effect. Either way, it was a temp job that had no ending while also having no promise of permanent employment, but it did provide me with better pay than I was receiving (which was a yearly salary of $0 or $0/hour if you prefer to look at it that way) and I worked 8:00-5:00pm everyday. That's exactly what I wanted. I wanted a normal job. I wanted to be an office drone.

RFMD made chips that were used in wireless communicators and other electronic devices. As I was told repeatedly during my time there, they were growing and had never laid anyone off. Being the jaded person I am, I pretty much assumed layoffs would be in the future (spoiler alert: They were). So I really had no idea what job I was doing upon walking in, but I got to wear shorts and a knit shirt (that's what I call what most people call "Polo" shirts) to work. Basically, what I ended up doing wasn't hard at all. There were engineers who needed parts sent out to their clients of RFMD for testing and other varied reasons that I wasn't privy to. It was my job to get these parts together and get them to engineers spread out over quite a few buildings. Some of the parts went into an oven (yes, an oven), other parts did not. It involved a lot of walking and taking direction, both of which I didn't mind doing.

So in March 2006 I started this job and it was a complete 180 difference from where I previously was. Lunches took two hours sometimes (not mine, because while the engineers were out at lunch they would call in with things that needed to be done RIGHT FUCKING NOW) and generally it was a very laid back atmosphere. In all frankness, the company seemed bloated to me. There were a lot of people who worked there and it didn't seem people were very stressed at the job with a lot of downtime to talk. But I loved it. I got a cell phone and I got to work with a guy who was the most anal-retentive person I have met in my life, which helped me deal with demanding people. This guy, named Jeff, had a system he used and if I didn't use that system then I was doing it all wrong. Having just gotten done with a job that had a specific system I was required to use, I had familiarity with this idea. The difference is Jeff's system actually worked. He dared me to try something different for a week. I did and it did not work. Jeff also had a thing for older women that I repeatedly tried to talk him out of to no avail. So it was a pretty good temp job. Low stress and it didn't require a ton of thought. I had time to look for other jobs and enjoyed it there. Still, I'm being honest in saying it wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I tried to leave once for a different job and they gave me a raise (I kid you not when I say they were bloated...they gave me, a fucking temp, a raise when I threatened to leave to take another job...who does that?), which of course pleased the temp agency because they got a percentage of what I was making (not from me, but from RFMD). Other than the fact I didn't have money and my girlfriend was making well over twice what I was making, it wasn't a bad deal.

But then I got a little restless. See I was a temp. That's how the engineers saw me. That's fine, but I had a Master's Degree and didn't like being talked to like I wasn't a smart person or talked to as if I wasn't on their level. It happened...frequently. I got asked a few times which high school I graduated from, in the tone of that being my highest education. My uncle never graduated high school and he's a millionaire, so no offense to those who didn't go to college, but I didn't take out all the student loans I did and work for six years in undergraduate and graduate school to be treated like I didn't go to college. So I decided rather than be comfortable in a job not making a ton of money I needed to REALLY look for a job. I was looking, but not really looking, if you know what I mean. So I started looking and after a month or so I got another job offer that was a permanent job and I was paid a sufficient amount more than I made as a temp (though, to be honest, not that much more for a permanent job) and took it. When I went to my temp agency to quit I was reminded by them they liked me at RFMD and a permanent job could be on the future because they have never laid anyone off. They also offered me another slight raise (I mean, stop offering a temp raises, even small ones...I'm a temp) as well. I explained that while I was a temp, I had seen the internal structure and work force of that company and had enough of an education background to understand if there was a dip in the economy or if they lost a few accounts then their success was in no way sustainable. There were too many well-paid people doing a similar job. So I took the new job and two months later RFMD had their first layoffs. I went to this new job, got treated in cheap fashion for the job I was doing (I was given a 0.8% raise one year when I know for a fact other departments got a 10% raise...I didn't like that) and used my experience there to get the job I have now. All has worked out.

I've gotten off track about my worst job ever, but it has a point. My point is that all has worked out. I feel like some people are stuck in jobs they hate and I was too. I was fortunate that I could afford to quit my job and go searching, but it was nerve-wracking. Very nerve-wracking. I was also fortunate my girlfriend understood I hated my job and allowed me the freedom to not nag me about finding another one. She understood the process. Of course, she quit a job she hated a few years later, so we are sort of even in that regard. You can see why we got married. We both make potentially bad job-related decisions because we can't stand doing something we don't like. Things turned out okay, it just took some time and for me to have patience, which is the hardest part for me.

Back to my worst job ever. This financial company ended up getting the last laugh on me, though not entirely intentionally. When I first started there in March 2006 my mother wanted to support my new endeavor and so she became one of my clients. She put her money into a fund and specifically asked my mentor if she was going to have to pay taxes on the money she had moved over to me. My mentor told her "No" and then gave a reason that I don't recall. It sounded weird to me at the time that there were no taxes to be paid on this money moved over, but I was in the process of learning the job and didn't speak up. This isn't the only one of my clients who this absolutely false information was handed out to, which makes me feel incredibly guilty. It turns out my mom did have to pay capital gains tax on what she moved over to me from the account she had with her current financial advisor...a lot of taxes. Needless to say, when we found this out in early 2007 I was pretty fucking pissed. Unfortunately, the financial company had worked for had covered their ass and guess whose name was the only name on those documents transferring the money over? That's right. Me. So whereas my mother could have chosen to sue her advisor for providing poor advice or at least threatened to do so based on the faulty information she was given, she wasn't going to sue her son.

I had retained an attorney for a different reason around this time and asked him whether there was a case that could be made and he basically told me it wasn't going to be worth the fight. My mom didn't want to pursue it anyway. I was the only one absolutely inflamed about how my name were on the forms that I wasn't even aware how to fill out appropriately at that point in my young career. Live and learn, right? I learned a lot from my worst job ever. Even now when I'm having a bad day, I calm myself by reminding myself it could always be a lot worse for me and has been a lot worse for me in the past. I would never advise anyone work for this company if they are even close to being the same kind of company they were when I was there. They treated their employees as tools to gain the financial accounts of that employee's family and friends and the pretty picture their commercials paint of advisors caring about their clients is patently wrong...at least when it comes from upper management. To this day, I think about my clients I had there and feel bad I simply left them without notifying them I was leaving. It's not how I like to do things in my life and (as you can tell) this whole experience left me with a very sour taste in my mouth. All I can advise anyone now is that if you see Tommy Lee Jones in a commercial, don't believe what he's saying. He's full of shit and doesn't even know it.

How I Went from Being Arrested for DUI to Being the Designated Driver in a Span of Two Hours

I've noticed something funny recently and I'm not being critical. Many years ago "Kissing Suzy Kolber" threatened to post pictures of Peter King's children on their site if he didn't stop talking about them in MMQB. Now, Big Daddy Drew (Drew Magary) is writing books about his children. I notice these things and they are neither good or bad. So at a certain point during success writers find (or believe) that their audience is interested in them as people. It's a tough balance. Good stories or lessons can be mined from a person's personal life, while if you do too much personal life writing then you end up like Rick Reilly at some point. That's bad.

That's why I started this separate blog from BotB. It gives options to those who still like my style of writing or want to hear boring/interesting/funny/disturbing stories from time-to-time. I like telling stories, though usually they are over a few beers, so I figure I would tell a good one today about beer. It's about me (almost) getting a DUI. Yes, it is hilarity about a DUI, and no, DUI's are not funny. The situation was funny in retrospect, especially since after I was arrested and when released the police officer demanded I be the designated driver for my friends. It's a serious life lesson, but a pretty funny one as to how it went down. If you think less of me after hearing the story, I do understand. There are certain turning points in a person's life and this was one of my turning points. Turning points aren't always the most uplifting stories.

So in May of 2002 I was still in college and was an idiot. I went to school in a small college town so the bars usually weren't far from where I live so sad to say, my friends and I didn't plan a cab ride or exactly who would drive prior to going out on the town drinking. Usually the next day started with me searching the parking lot of my apartment for my car trying to remember how I got home. It's not glorious, it was the state of affairs. Someone driving home drunk or pretty drunk was how I got home many times and there is a list a mile long of things I deserved for taking part in such irresponsible actions. My friends and I had a designated driver, a 19 year old friend of ours who would get drunk before going out to the bar and then sobered up by the time we got back from the bar. It didn't always work out that she was around though.

What's weird is that from the time I could drink in May of 2001 until the very next year I never once thought, "There could be serious issues for me if I get caught driving home from Concord, NC semi-drunk or drive home even a mile down the road after hitting the college bars." I thought about it, but more as a "I'm probably not going to get caught and there will be no ramifications for this decision"-type thing. The fact nothing ever happened to me or I didn't kill myself/someone else was very fortunate. The more my friends and I drove in a non-legal fashion like this, the more it empowered us that we could do it. I was even more enpowered after one drive home in the summer of 2001. One time I went to Charlotte to watch a movie and have dinner with a friend. One beer turned to way more than one beer and then it turned into the the fact we were going to see "Scary Movie 2" very drunk. It was a grand time. After the movie, I drove home and most likely over the legal limit and it turns out there was a DUI checkpoint at the exit I was supposed to get off on. Bad luck, but deserved, right?

So I pull up to the police officer who is "checking licenses" (i.e. checking to see how many drunk people he can catch by giving himself the probable cause to stop my car he otherwise would not have had) and hand him my license. Now mind you, "Scary Movie 2" was not a long movie and I was still pretty tipsy. I was wearing an Atlanta Braves hat low-ish on my head and smoking a cigarette. Yes, I didn't put my cigarette out to speak with the police officer. Why would I? That would show a concern for my situation and a respect for the authority of the police officer. I had just lit the cigarette up though, so there's no sense in wasting a perfectly good cigarette (Yes, I used to smoke, and yes I run. Yes, I used to run three miles and then light up a cigarette on the way to the car. Yes, I threw up in the parking lot one time after doing this). I was basically a DUI commercial waiting to happen. We talked about the Braves prospects to win the World Series for 10 seconds as he searched my car not-so-covertly with a flashlight, handed me my license, I explained to him I was coming back from watching a movie in Concord and then I drove off. Lucky me...or unlucky me that my evetual wake-up call didn't come in a town where my family didn't know a lot of attorneys, I knew the county police chief fairly well, and my dad didn't know the city police chief very well. If the following story had happened in my hometown it would have been no less embarrassing, but I would have probably been less nervous because I had more connections in my hometown. So actually, it probably was a good thing I got the shit scared out of me in Boone, North Carolina because it taught me (and my friends) a very important lesson. You know sometimes your purpose in life is to serve as an example to others? That's me. I'm the example.

My point of that non-funny story is that I was brazened by the fact I thought I was good at acting non-drunk. I took a International Economics exam one time still drunk from Halloween the night before. I definitely lacked maturity in the whole area of "Do people know I'm drunk?" awareness. I got a B on that exam, which of course only further brazened me to believe drunk or sober I'm smarter than most others either way. So fast forward back to May 2002 and my friends and I are going out to a bar to celebrate the last day of exams. The night started innocently enough. I convinced my roommate who never went out anymore to go out to the bar with me and we would be meeting five other friends at the bar to share a couple pitchers of beer. I was the designated driver, which meant I wasn't going to get very drunk (but yes, I would be drinking), and would be responsible for shuttling people back to their homes at the end of the night. No big deal. We get to the bar, have a couple of pitchers of beer, and then my roommate announces I need to take him home. Well, I have had a few beers and wasn't planning on stopping drinking quite yet. I figured we would close the bar down and I would be sober enough to drive home in a bit. I disagree that he is leaving and he disagrees with me disagreeing with him leaving. The conversation (and our first argument...ever) went like this:

(Me) "No. We are staying for at least another hour."

(Him) "I'm leaving, you can stay. Give me the keys to your car."

(Me) "No, I am driving my car because you are in no shape to be driving, much less driving my damn car."

(Him) "Give me your keys. I'll come get you guys when you call me."

(Me) "You will be asleep as soon as you get back and then we will be stranded. Fuck that, let's go (I start fast-walking out to my car with my keys)."

(We approach my car and he says) "You are being a pussy about this. Let me drive the fucking car home and I will come get you later."

(I throw my keys on the ground and say) "No way, I'm driving and when I get a DUI I will be sure to tell you all about. I'll wake you up and tell you about how your insistence on going home at 11:30pm got me a DUI (clearly the fact it was my idea to drive him home didn't stop me from blaming him for my decision)."

So we drove home angry and I dropped him off. After leaving our apartment to go back to the bar I got a really weird feeling something wasn't right. I thought at the time it was the fact we had gotten in a fight over something silly, but I was REALLY nervous driving back to the bar. I wasn't sloppy drunk, but I also should not have been driving a car at that point. I make it all the way to the road that the bar is on, about a half mile away from the bar...and let's play a game and decide what I do at this point:

A. I keep my eye on the rearview mirror and think I just have a few more feet to go before I can get out of my car. Just hold steady and keep driving.

B. I stop the car on the side of the road and call a cab to take me the rest of the way.

C. I decide in the next 30 seconds I will be in the car I need to listen to new music and decide to change out the CD.

Guess what? I chose C. Sure, I'm going to be in the car for 30 more seconds, but I NEED NEW MUSIC DAMMIT! So I pull a CD out and it drops on the floor. At this point, I am approaching the last curve of the road before the bar comes up on the left so what I do I decide to do?:

A. Let the CD go and keep driving while listening to the radio.

B. I stop the car on the side of the road and call a cab or walk the rest of the way.

C. I need to pick up this fucking CD immediately.

I chose C. I leaned over to pick up the CD and my car drifts over the double yellow line briefly. I grab the CD and then gently (and I did gently do this) put the car entirely on the right side of the double yellow line. I barely even knew I had crossed the double yellow line. I see blue lights flash in my rearview mirror and I know that's not something I want to see. So I pull into the parking lot of the bar I am trying to go back to. Yes, I was AT THE BAR when I got pulled over on this huge incline. To call this incline on the way into the bar huge would be an understatement. It was at a pretty steep angle and I already had my game plan prepared for the road sobriety tests I knew I was about to take.

Quick aside: I was friends with a lot of guys who were Criminal Justice majors looking to go into law enforcement. A lot. So at parties I had drunkenly taken most field tests as administered by amateur police officers and felt pretty good about taking them drunk. Again, I'm a brazen asshole. I know this. So upon knowing I would have to take these field tests I wasn't worried. I figured if I could get to even ground I would at least show the cops I was in the parking lot of the bar where my friends are and I am trustworthy enough to walk in the door and not drink anymore. Unfortunately, if getting pulled for DUI was "Double Dare" then I was well-prepared to take the physical challenge part of the game, but I didn't realize I had not been quizzed on the question-and-answer portion of the sobriety field test. That's the part that failed me.

So I stop by car and wait for the policeman to walk up to my door. He does get to my door and then asks the general question we all get asked when we get pulled over, except it sounded like it came from the voice of Darth Vader, not a Boone policeman.

"Do you know why I stopped you?"

I was in a full blown panic at this point because I knew at this moment this wasn't a DUI checkpoint and I had been pulled for cause and I had never been pulled for anything. Nothing. Not a ticket. Not a tail light out. Nothing. This is my first time ever speaking to a policeman where I was obviously suspected of doing something wrong and not just a guy in a car. The question fucked me up. It was like he asked me,

"Explain every action you have ever taken and how it impacts who you are as a person."

I was mind-fucked. I was in a panic and it wasn't stopping. I rarely panic, but once I start panicking I usually don't get my bearings quickly. I wasn't being cool under pressure and I was realizing we wouldn't move wordlessly to a safe, level area where he would marvel at my ability to perform the field sobriety tests and then videotape me to show how his fellow officers how adept I was at passing field sobriety tests. He wanted me to talk to him and I (believe it or not) didn't expect this. I guess I expected us to play an extended game of charades where he would motion me to perform the field sobriety tests and he wouldn't want a question-and-answer session with me.

I told him I thought I might have gone across the double yellow line briefly and that's why I am guessing he stopped me. It went something like this:

(Me) "I dropped my CD and foolishly decided to pick it up. I drifted a bit. Is that why?"

(Cop) "Sir, can you remove your hat?"

(Me) "My hat? No, it was a CD that fell on the floor. It had nothing to do with my hat (again, I wasn't being smart with him, but I was panicking and wanted him to know the full story) falling."

(Cop) "Take the hat off (I took it off and put it on the seat beside me). Where were you coming from? Have you been drinking?"

(Me) "Yes, I have been drinking. I am the designated driver and I just got back from taking my roommate home. He is a Criminal Justice major ('he's just like you!') and couldn't afford to get a DUI so I drove him home (because see, I CAN afford to get a DUI)."

(Cop in the Darth Vader voice again) "How much did you have to drink tonight?"*

*I gave what may be the worst response ever given to a police officer. Ever. I started off lying to him because I didn't know the answer, then went back to what I thought may be the truth, and then told him the real truth.

(Me) "I had one beer, I think (I'm an expert liar)."

(Cop) "Why are you lying?"

(Me) "Maybe I had two beers or possibly three beers. I don't know how much I have had because we had a pitcher and my drink kept getting filled up, so I don't have an accurate count. I do know I feel fine to drive though."*

*Oh, you feel fine to drive. Well then, case closed. Let's move on and you are free to go.

(Cop) "We are going to run through some tests. Can you say your alphabet please?"

At this point, what do you think I did? Did I:

A. Say my alphabet as any 3.40 student majoring in Economics would be able to do?

B. Ask for an attorney and then run into the bar? 

C. Offer to blow into a field Breathalyzer?

D. Say my alphabet and SCREW MY DAMN ALPHABET UP?

I did C...then when I was told there wasn't a need for that I said my alphabet and skipped the letter "Q." Yes, I screwed up the alphabet, because why not? No, I wasn't asked to do the alphabet backwards, but forwards, and I messed it up. Like any good student I offered to do it again, because you know, maybe he is grading on a curve.

(Cop smiles and says) "Can you give your hat to me please and then step out of the car?"

(Me) "Can I leave my hat in the car?"*

*It's funny what you latch onto. I loved my Braves hat and let no one but me wear it. I wore it everywhere and at this point I wanted that hat IN MY CAR and not with the policeman. I'm about to perform field sobriety tests after failing to say my alphabet correctly and I am worried about where my hat may go. Trust me, my latching onto the hat doesn't end here. It's my Wilson (of "Cast Away" fame) during this entire adventure. I probably will skip over times I asked for my hat or was concerned about my hat. The Braves hat = life.

(Cop) "No, I want it. Please give it to me."

(I gave him my hat and stepped out of the car...fortunately I was not smoking a cigarette at this point, so maybe I had learned something from running into a DUI checkpoint the previous summer)

(Cop) "Stand here then and stand on one leg while trying to touch your nose with your opposite hand."*

*This may have been his directions, I'm not sure. I was like a pitcher who had just given up back-to-back-to-back home runs and there is no one warming up in the bullpen. I need to be pulled from the game immediately, but it isn't happening.

(Me) "Can I go to the level ground because I don't feel like this will accurately represent my ability to balance right now. I have terrible balance."*

*At the time I didn't realize through the chain of events of lying about how much I had to drink, not wanting to give up my hat and now dictating the terms of the sobriety test I was antagonizing the cop. Sadly, I didn't think about this at the time. Again, these are things you learn from.

(Cop) "I think it's fine to do it here."

(I stand on one leg while touching my nose for maybe two seconds and then can't stand much longer)

(Cop) "Now follow this light with your eyes."

(Me losing my mind completely...I would have been better off calling him a pig and insinuating I slept with his wife then what I said next...say) "Well, this test isn't admissible in court anyway, but I'll do it."*

**I'll do it! See how nice I was being? You can't arrest a guy who does what the police tell him to do can you? I am now dictating the field sobriety tests and telling the police officer even though I know he can't use this in court, I will humor him. I also realize I am not coming off well here. So be it. I was insanely nervous and desperately trying to grab a hold of the situation like the control freak I am. Dammit, I needed control and was failing. I was also failing at doing anything to help my case to not end up in handcuffs shortly.

(Cop) "Just do it."

(I follow the light and probably failed this as well because my eyes are usually a little red)

(Cop) "Now, close your eyes and touch your nose with your fingers."

(Me) "Can I please go do this over on level ground?"

(Cop) "We're almost done, so just hang here."

(I perfectly touch my fingers on my nose as I expected I would. Always choose the physical challenge, that's the rule...if I had just been briefed about the question-and-answer session things could have gone differently)

(The cop goes back to his car and a Sheriff's car pulls up. Being the intuitive person I am, I took this as a not-good sign. At least I was right about something on this night. It wasn't a good sign.)

(The cop talks to the sheriff's deputy, then walks back to me and handcuffs me) "Sir, you are under arrest for suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol..."*

*I don't remember the rest, I just know I got handcuffed and it was a terrible, terrible feeling. He could have offered me a chance to run away during his speech if I said the magic word and I wouldn't have known. I wasn't listening and was thinking about how I would explain this to my parents.

Then the cop put me in his car, with the passenger window down, and the sheriff's deputy comes by and starts talking to me. To this day I won't forget what he said, because well, fuck this guy. I was clearly a scared college kid (granted, who also happened to be under arrest for a fairly major vehicular crime) and he antagonized me. Yes, I was in the wrong, but the amount of antagonism for how much my head was hanging always seemed disproportionate to me. I clearly wasn't being aggressive.

(Sheriff's deputy) "You been doing some drinking tonight?"

(Me) "Yes, it seems that way. Can I please take a breathalyzer or can you please go into the bar and tell my friends they will have to find a cab home. I am their ride. They are going to be worried about me when I don't answer my cell phone and they are going to drive home at the end of the night. Please allow me to call one of them to come out here and explain the situation."

(Sheriff's deputy laughs) "They'll get the message when you don't show up to get them."

(Me) "Okay, that's fine. They are going to be worried."

(Sheriff's deputy) "Maybe they'll come visit you in jail tomorrow to get you out."

(Me getting irritated) "If they don't know I am there, they probably won't know how to find me."

(Sheriff's deputy laughs again) "Enjoy your night and your lesson. Hopefully your friends won't make the same mistake."

(Me talking to him as he walks away) "But they are going to drive if they don't know to get a cab and can't get a hold of me."*

*At this point, in my "Star Wars" analogy if the cop was Darth Vader then this sheriff's deputy was the Emperor telling me my weakness was I had too much faith in my friends. And yes, Luke Skywalker was a good guy and I was the bad guy in this situation. I get it. I also got the Sheriff's deputy's car number implanted in my brain for future reference. I didn't like his attitude.

So the cop got back in the car and I again pleaded with him to allow me to call my friends and leave a voice message as to where I am or give me a field breathalyzer. He declined because he is good at his job and I was just some drunk guy. On the way back I asked the police officer a series of questions and got the following answers:

-Yes, I am officially under arrest.

-No, I won't be able to get bailed out of jail that night. I will have to be in the drunk tank and wait until morning.

-No, I can't have my Braves hat with me in the drunk tank.

-No, I really can't have the Braves hat to use as a pillow in the drunk tank.*

*Even to this day I don't regret wanting my Braves hat. It was my only Braves hat and I was very unclear on how I would retrieve it. Would I get it in a box after I left the drunk tank the next morning like I see in movies? Would I never get it back and then one day see a person wearing That hat became my binky and I wanted my hat. At the time, it was very important to control something, anything.

Then I said,

"My dad is going to kill me."

The cop got agitated and looked at me angrily saying,

"Who is your dad? What does he do?"

I told the cop my dad wasn't anyone special (to him) and he would just be mad at me. To this day, his agitated reaction surprises me. I guess a lot of kids drop their parent's name for effect. I was much too worried about the status of my Braves hat to name drop.

We got to the jail and I took all of my belongings out of my pocket to take the breathalyzer. I ask the policeman if I can please go pee before I take the breathalyzer. He agrees and takes me to the restroom, taking my handcuffs off so I can open my fly. I pee and it was a fantastic feeling since I figured I would be in a drunk tank in about 10 more minutes.

So now the time had come. I was going to take the breathalyzer to see how drunk I was and I really believed I was drunk. Actually I KNEW I should not have been driving. If I had not mentioned it before, I was fucked, and knew it. The legal limit in North Carolina is 0.08, which is probably too high, but that's the legal limit. My Braves hat was in front of me, my phone said I had missed 17 phone calls in the last hour, and now I was going to see how long I was losing my license for. It's going to be hard to go to law school four hours away from home in the middle of nowhere without a license to drive around. I deserved it all and it wasn't a good feeling. So the cop and I sat down at the breathalyzer.

This is what happened next,

(Cop) "Blow gently into the breathalyzer, please."

I lean forward and blow gently into the breathalyzer wondering if I am going to lose my license for a year, two years, or if I could get a good attorney to at least allow me to keep my license while paying a hefty fine. All of this is ricocheting in my mind that I don't notice what the breathalyzer says. It says 0.07.

(Me) "What the hell?"*

*Yes, I said that. I failed three out of four sobriety tests and knew I couldn't drive, so I didn't expect it to come to under 0.08. I was simply asking for the field breathalyzer back at the bar in the hopes the beer I had just drank 30 minutes before would not hit my bloodstream yet. I figured the longer I waited to take a breathalyzer, the better the chance of a higher test result. While I was busy fucking up the alphabet I had a plan to minimize my breathalyzer result. It's like I was a general in the army and had the perfect plan of action on how to attack the enemy, but forgot to bring the guns to attack the enemy with.

(Cop look stunned) "Blow again, please. Do it a little more forcefully."

I blew a 0.07 again.

(Cop looking at my phone as it rings for the 18th missed call, he's clearly getting pissed off at me and his bad fortune to not have busted me for drunk driving) "One more time."

I blew a 0.07 again. At this point, I am about to break the handcuffs off with pure joy. I had dodged a bullet and knew it. Life began again. I had no idea what would happen next, but I knew I was below the legal limit. DUI was off the table. So the cop then informed me he was writing me up for going left of center, which apparently isn't as strict of a violation as getting a DUI, but does carry quite a few points on your insurance. My parents would be less than thrilled about this obviously.

I ask him what "left of center" means and he explained it to me. It was a very complicated term and it meant I went left of the yellow center line while driving. Again, it was a very complicated term. At this point, the cop takes the handcuffs off me and he gives me the ticket (I think...everything is a blur because I was so happy I wasn't going to spend a night in jail). I ended up getting a ticket, I saw a magistrate, there may have been a polar bear playing checkers in the corner...who knows? I wasn't paying attention because I had just dodged a bullet. Then the cop and I walk out to his police car and he begins to drive me back to the bar where he had originally pulled me over. On the way back, we had a conversation that went something like this,

(Me) "Once I get back to the bar, how do you propose I get home? I certainly don't want to drive."

(Cop) "I want to go back to the bar and drive all of your friends home at the end of the night. They are still there drinking, right?"

(Me laughing softly) "Well, I think so. I know I missed a few calls from them, so I don't know exactly where they are right now."

(Cop) "They had better hope they aren't driving."

(I was thinking that I could have avoided them driving if he had simply allowed me to tell them where I was at and that they need to call a cab) "Okay, I hope so too. Can I ask you a question and I'm not being funny..."

(Cop) "Yep, go for it."

(Me) "If I drive my car, are you going to pull me over on my way home or are you fine with me being the designated driver for my friends?"

(Cop laughs...I'm just kidding, he didn't laugh because he was humorless and I thought hated me because he had just spent an hour on an arrest he would never get to make) "I am requesting you do so."

(Me) "Sounds good." (Secretly, I couldn't wait to tell the story of how I got arrested for DUI and then the cop asked that I drive all my friends home)

So we had boring banter (even more boring than this story) after that and he dropped me off at the bar. I moved my car to a parking space. Yes, my car was just sitting at the entrance to the parking lot. If I had spent the night in jail I'm assuming it would have been towed or just sat there...who knows? Then I walk into the bar and my friends are very, very drunk. I go over to their table and they act like I had been gone for years. They ask where I had been and I slapped the left of center ticket down on the table, showed them the mark from the handcuffs, poured myself a beer (just for effect mind you...fine, I did have a couple sips) and said "I got taken into the police station under suspicion of DUI after taking Matt home."

(Friend) "Where did you get pulled over?"

(Me pointing outside the bar) "Right, motherfucking there. I almost made it." 

(Friend) "You should have jumped out of your car and run in here."

(Me) "Trust me, that did cross my mind."

Of course they didn't believe me at first, except I'm a wiggly person and did have handcuffs on my wrist, plus I still looked pale and they probably figured I wasn't lying after I told the story. It also helps I don't lie. Reality is so much crazier than a lie many times anyway. After I told them what I blew on the breathalyzer my friend pointed at me and said "I'm calling you 007 from now on. 007!" Then he proceeded to give me a high-five and that nickname stuck for no one else but him for the next few years. Though ironically he got pulled after leaving a bar in 2004 under suspicion of DUI and he blew a 0.07 on the breathalyzer. The "007" nickname sort of got dropped by him after that. See, reality is so much more crazy than a lie.

So I drove everyone home and then we all went up to my apartment and we woke up my roommate up (I KNEW he would be asleep. I was right) by turning the light on quickly, which in retrospect wasn't a great decision because had did have a gun he stowed under his bed. You just don't want to startle a guy with a gun under his bed, even if it isn't loaded. He thought I was completely kidding when I told him I got taken to the police station, even after I showed him the cuff marks on my wrist, and even quizzed me the next day on whether I was lying. He was eventually convinced by logic. I really enjoyed going out and drinking, so would I really leave all my friends at a bar for an hour and a half on the last day of classes to pull a prank? No, I would not. I would go where the friends and beer went. Plus, I did have that "left of center" ticket.

I tell this story so much better in person, but I've always enjoyed how I went from being arrested under suspicion of DUI to being a designated driver in a span of two hours. To this day, I will not drive a car if I have had more than two drinks and I will not get in the car with a person I feel has had too much to drink. Someday I will probably tell my kids this story and I will be embarrassed by it, but it's good to serve as an example others can't follow I guess. I'm not a walking PSA or anything like that, but a dropped CD is what ultimately put me in the position to be in handcuffs. Well, that and not knowing the alphabet. Eventually the "left of center" violation was removed from my license and my parent's car insurance did not go up. It cost more money than I would have liked in court appearances for the attorney to get this done, but it did get done. It also helped the police officer told the judge I was cooperative and polite. Yeah, I wasn't very cooperative and polite in my opinion.

Two denouncements to this story. First, I forever disliked that sheriff's deputy for the way he seemed to taunt me in the car. Yes, I may have deserved it, but I was pretty contrite at the time and wasn't being hostile. I felt his words towards me were a little too taunting as compared to my behavior. I have friends who disagreed and said I deserved a little taunting. Perhaps. Well, I remembered his car number and during the Summer of 2002 I found his empty sheriff's car outside of a restaurant while walking home from a bar. I took the liberty of watering his back tire for him. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't have done this. Maturity isn't something that comes overnight I guess. But hey, I'm sure he is still haunted to this day by the smell of urine on the back tire of his police car (if he was even driving that same car at that point).

Second, I was on my way home from attending a football game at my undergraduate alma mater going back to my grad school when I got pulled over for doing 53 mph in a 35 mph zone. It was a speed trap and I got caught in it. When the police officer came to my window he asked why I was going so fast. I told him I just didn't slow down fast enough when it went from 55 mph to 35 mph and left it at that. Then he asked for my license and registration, so I pulled my glovebox open.

Out spilled six or seven airplane bottles that I had purchased that weekend and was saving for the next football game. When they fell to the floor of my car I yelled, "Son of a bitch! Seriously?" Then I quickly told the cop that I had not been drinking nor was I drunk and at that point probably became the first person to ever voluntarily subject himself to a breathalyzer test at 4:30pm on a Sunday when there was never even a question posed by the police officer whether that person had been drinking or not. The cop declined and actually laughed at my reaction. I was obviously still scarred from my DUI adventure a few summers before. He took my license and registration and went back to his car. After about three minutes he came back to my car, chuckled again, and said "You have an absolutely clean driving record, you just have to learn to slow down there. Also, keep the airplane bottles somewhere other than the glove compartment. It looks bad." I told him "thanks" and drove on. I like to pretend my lack of poise got me out of that ticket.

I have friends who have gotten a DUI in their lifetime and feel very fortunate I narrowly avoided being one of those people. At 21 years old, you aren't always thinking straight. That's never an excuse, but to this day I get nervous if I had 1-2 drinks and I pass a police car. Sometimes the best lesson is to get scared straight.

My Remembrances of 9/11

There have been quite a few 9/11 remembrances today and for good reason. It's natural to reflect on such an important event. I'm not going to claim to be the best at remembering the events of that day with super-deep thoughts and I personally had no family ties to New York (well, I didn't at the time), but it's one of those days that goes without saying will never be forgotten. Every generation has a moment (or two or three) where they will never forget where they were and for this generation 9/11 is probably the moment most people can remember where they were. Even 12 years after I'm not entirely sure how to talk about the events that occurred.

I was on the AppalCart, which was basically a bus that took me to class everyday at Appalachian State, getting ready for a 9:30am class. We always heard music (as chosen by the bus driver) on the bus and on this day talk radio was playing. It wasn't unusual and I don't think anyone on the bus really was paying great attention to what the radio was saying. I kept hearing about an attack on New York and figured they were talking about the previous World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Quickly it became apparent as I listened to the radio this was a terrorist attack currently taking place and this wasn't a discussion of the 1993 bombing. I wasn't scared because it was around 8:50am and I didn't know it was an attack on multiple levels. It just seems a plane hit the World Trade Center. No one knew why yet. After the short ride to the business school for my 9:30am class I stayed outside for a cigarette and what struck me as odd (in retrospect of course) is how calm everyone was talking. At this point, I don't think the magnitude of what happened was completely understood. There was very little panic or sadness because all of the information wasn't known yet. There was one plane that hit the World Trade Center and even when the second plane hit I don't think it sunk in that it was a planned attack. My 9:30am class still took place and then of course everyone stood around the television after that to watch the horror as it was recapped and shown on repeat. My 12:30pm class was canceled and we were given the option of watching the news coverage as a class together, which I remember everyone in the class choosing to do.

What I remember most about 9/11, at least in my corner of the world, was the reaction my friends had to what happened. I, being who I am, wasn't that surprised that America had gotten attacked. Obviously I didn't wake up on that Tuesday morning and expect that there would be a terrorist attack, but being a somewhat history buff and having a Political Science minor, I knew other countries didn't exactly love the United States and an attack was always a possibility. There had been two prior attacks on American soil and we were only a year removed from the bombing of the USS Cole. So for me, an attack on American soil that was very successful didn't sound that out of the realm of possibility. Clearly I did not want this to happen, but I wasn't incredibly shocked, but more concerned and frustrated at the lack of immediate information.

A lot of arguments were started among my friends (mostly them arguing with me) based on my lack of what I called at the time "unbreakable faith in America being immune from the world." I'm not sure I need to explain what this means too much, but I was shocked by the outright shock that my friends had. It's not the shock of what happened, but the shock this could happen to the United States, as if the US isn't a world citizen and therefore the problems of the world would never touch American soil. I had a very vicious (and vicious was the word for it, trust me, it got personal) conversation with a friend of mine about the terrorist attacks. We were watching the coverage and I finally said, "Well, this probably was bound to happen at some point" and before I could completely finish my thought that statement pretty much sent my friend into a rage. I guess the inevitability (from my point of view) of a terrorist group or another country bringing violence against the United States came off as too smug for him. I'm not sure.

I probably was smug about it, but I thought his shock was more about "How dare they do this to us, our citizens are supposed to be immune from this type of thing" than actual sympathy and concern for the victims of the attack. I felt it was more of an arrogant attitude of American superiority that was being displayed rather than concern for what had happened. The world was interconnected and at some point all the bad shit that happened around the world had to happen in America's backyard. Heck, it already happened twice before. Of course, my friend took this to mean I didn't care about what happened and thought it was deserved for the United States meddling in affairs around the world. That couldn't have been further from the truth, but I don't think he was willing to put aside his rage for a few minutes to understand my theory of the world being interconnected and at some point the fight would be brought to American soil. I wasn't willing to put aside my smug attitude that was admittedly focused too much on the inevitability of the attack.

I would do things differently now, of course, but at the time I saw video of people jumping out of the building to their death and pointed out to my friend that terrible shit like this happens nearly everyday around the world. I wasn't trying to downplay what had happened, but point out that terrible things happen all over the world and it doesn't make logical sense for the United States to be immune simply because we are the United States.

After I pointed this out he said, and I won't forget it, "It's not supposed to happen in America. It's not right."

I responded, while pointing a finger of course, "That's the exact type of attitude that led us to this situation happening. You think we are too good for this to happen, the government thought we were too good for this to happen and this shows we aren't too good."

Again, poorly chosen words there, but I still understand what I was attempting to get at. I live in the United States and obviously I love this country and think it is the greatest country on Earth. I think 9/11 was a day where some of the naivety (for myself as well) was ripped away from America and the reality that a small group of people with funding could have a huge negative impact finally set in. Terrorist attacks can happen in America, just like terrorist attacks happen in other parts of the world. It's not fair, it's not right, but it was the new reality. I wasn't trying to be cold about it, but reality sucks and 9/11 was a huge reality check for a lot of Americans.

My remembrances of 9/11 are just a lot of confusion and the reality that I want America to be different and immune, but I knew it wasn't true. America is a part of the world and the world can be an ugly place. When you are a large country with a powerful military like the United States you tend to accumulate enemies as quickly as you accumulate friends. I'm not sure generations who weren't alive when 9/11 happened will never understand the confusion, anger and hurt that took place among American citizens on that day. Those days after the attack when America pulled together, George Bush stepped on the rubble with a megaphone, and it was clear American would bounce back with time makes me feel proud still.

I never thought this type of attack would really happen to the magnitude that it did, but at the time I was frustrated with the "we should be immune"-type attitude that some of my friends had. I don't think some of my friends understood that other countries viewed the United States in a negative light and this would make us a target for terrorist activity. There was no reason a terrorist attack couldn't happen on American soil, specifically since it had already happened at the World Trade Center and in Oklahoma City. I hated the reality of it. 9/11 is a day where we all go around remembering, while also wishing we could forget. Forgetting wouldn't do justice to the emergency responders and helpless American citizens who got trapped in the two towers or were on one of the flights on that day, so it's our responsibility to remember.

I can't imagine the feeling of being an emergency responder and having to climb stairs up one of the towers knowing full well you very well may not be coming back down the stairs. I think that's my biggest remembrance of 9/11, not the stupid fight(s) I had, not the shock about the event, but the reminder that when it all goes to shit there are heroes whose name I will never remember willing to step in and try to help save the lives of others. For me, while 9/11 is a horrible day in American history, I also remember it as a great day when the United States was tested and responded with heroism, strength, and resolve. That's how I choose to remember the day. The spirit of the nation wasn't broken even at the worst of times.

I Blame Cancer (and Maybe Randy Johnson) for My Father's Death

I posted this on Bottom of the Barrel a year ago and figured I would re-post it here since my personal blog is a more appropriate place for this type of writing. I'm not big on re-posting something I have previously written, but figured I would make an exception today.

My father passed away 9 years ago today at the age of 55. He died of a very aggressive form of prostate cancer. Prior to him being diagnosed, the only thing I knew about prostate cancer is it seemed like a nicer way of saying “ass cancer.” Clearly I was way off on what prostate cancer was and where the hell the prostate was exactly located. Of course I also thought the word “prejudice” was spelled “pregidous” until I was 12 years old. My 6^th grade paper on Martin Luther King, Jr. was probably a great source of laughter among the teachers at my school. I found out my freshman year of college that he was diagnosed with this type of cancer when my sister called me in my dorm room and said my parents were going to call me and tell me some bad news. My sister then told me the bad news. She decided to tell me before they could get to me because she knows my mother and father always found a way to deliver bad news in the worst way possible. Generally, my parents’ way of breaking bad news to me was saying something like, “I know you hate going to West Virginia for Thanksgiving, so we have good news! You don’t have to go to West Virginia for Thanksgiving anymore because your grandfather died!” Maybe that’s just the way it would have sounded to me.

Let me go down a rabbit hole really quickly and allow me to explain this better. A few years after my father’s diagnosis (that’s what we called it because it sounded better than “was told he was going to die sooner than he thought he would and it wasn’t going to be of natural causes”) my parents had discussed with me the idea of putting to sleep the dog I had since I was five years old. He was old and could barely walk. It didn’t help our “new” family dog took great pride in knocking him over like a bowling pin at every opportunity. When my parents and I had this conversation, I requested they call me and I would come home from college to say my last goodbyes to my nearly-lifelong pet when they made this decision. I only reiterated I wanted it to happen this way probably five times. Naturally, they decided to go ahead and put him to sleep two weeks after this conversation and NOT NOTIFY ME AT ALL. I got no call saying they were taking him to the hospital, no one calling to ask if I want him to bark at me one last time, asking whether I prefer they cremate him or bury him in the backyard…nothing. So 24 hours after the dastardly deed was done, my mother calls me on my cell phone and asks to speak to my roommate while we are at a party. She tells him they put my dog to sleep and to break the news to me tomorrow after we get back from the party. Anyway, my roommate immediately told me they had put my dog to sleep and I proceeded to have a conversation with my parents about the appropriate way to break bad news to a person.

This is why my sister called me regarding my father's bad news first before my parents could find a way to make this already bad news even worse. For all I know they would have called in a bomb threat to my dorm so I could see the bad news along with everyone else plastered on the side of a blimp hovering over the Appalachian mountains. I put nothing past them in their inability to deliver bad news appropriately.

So I am told by my sister that my parents are going to call me and tell me the bad news, which did happen maybe five minutes after I hung up with her. My dad was very positive about his diagnosis and said it wasn’t known if it had spread or not but the doctors knew it was malignant. He said he had known the doctors found the tumor during Christmas three weeks earlier, but he didn’t want us to worry until we got a full diagnosis about whether it had spread to other parts of his body or not. I’m not sure how he and my mom got through Christmas keeping this news to themselves. I was obviously worried after speaking with my father, but optimistic it was caught in time since my father had gotten his PSA checked just six months prior. A week or so after the original bad news, I received another phone call from dad saying the cancer had spread to three places in his body, but he said there was a possibility they could do surgery and remove the cancer. That sounded great. There’s still a chance all would be well. Still feeling somewhat positive. Another week or so later we find out surgery isn’t a possibility because the cancer was in the bone. I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure chopping into a patient’s bones to remove cancer is a highly dangerous medical procedure. This was it. This was the final answer. There wasn't anything the doctors could do to stop the growth on a permanent basis. He was given 5-10 years to live. He lived for 5 years and 4 months.

It’s a funny thing, as I am sure many other people can attest to, how a terminal prognosis works. Once the initial shock of the prognosis wears off, the person with the terminal illness becomes the voice of reason and everyone else around him/her starts freaking the fuck out. Life becomes this ticking clock where you know there is a budgeted time left over, but you don’t know how much time has been budgeted. Sure, life is permanently that way, but it’s different when it is someone you love who has that ticking clock on their life and you try to fit everything you can into an uncertain amount of time. You think of all the things your parent will never participate in that will be big deals in your life. That’s how it selfishly worked for me. It is selfish, but I thought about these things. I thought he won’t see me get married probably (which he didn’t), he won’t see my sister get married (which he won't), he won’t meet his grandchildren (which he didn’t), and my mom will be a widow (which she is). All of a sudden your life becomes a countdown of sorts until something you know will happen, but really don't want to happen, actually does occur. It’s a very bizarre feeling and I know I am not the only one to ever experience this.

After the initial prognosis, we started going down the list of things he also wanted to do, but never got a chance to. I guess we’d call it a bucket list. My family went on a cruise, he traveled with my mom a lot and just generally got a much healthier outlook about life. It’s funny how that works too. Once he saw the end coming he was able to throw out all the other crap that most healthy people spend most of their life worrying about. It becomes sort of a “I know I’m going to die, so I really don’t give a crap” outlook on life. I think it liberated him in some ways to be able to focus on what was important. Another ironic part is he looked healthier than ever the first 1-2 years after his cancer diagnosis. He used to work out like crazy when healthy and he was in good shape, but probably too skinny and wiry for his own good because he didn’t have time to eat enough to properly maintain the workout he was keeping up. So after he was diagnosed with cancer he gained some weight, worked out less and looked a lot healthier, despite the fact he was dying of cancer.

The first couple of years weren’t so bad. I say that as a person who didn’t have terminal prostate cancer of course. I think he would agree, especially when compared to the last few years of his life. He got tired more quickly and had some pain at times in the beginning, but he was still able to work. I committed myself to coming home every summer from college to spend time with him, always mindful of that constant ticking clock which told me I didn’t have much time to see him. It’s that clock that was the worst for me. It was the intangible feeling THIS could be the last time for us to watch the MLB playoffs together, next time I see him he could have difficulty getting up the stairs or he would have trouble doing something he has always been able to do.

I honestly would be lying if I thought I could give you a timeline for his cancer in a medical sense and how the cancer progressed medically. There are two reasons for this. The first is I was away at college and he did not want me distracted. I wasn’t given complete information at all times other than being told how he felt. The second is I didn’t concern myself how the progression was going in a strictly medical sense. I wanted to know (a) how long he had left, (b) what the doctors had said at his recent appointment and (c) how he was feeling physically, emotionally, mentally. I don’t know the exact date he started chemotherapy, but I know how it made him feel, the effect it had on him, and when it stopped. Part of not knowing the minute details was a selfish desire in the hopes if I learned less about exactly what is happening, then it isn’t real. I was guilty of that. I was away at college and it was easy to compartmentalize it while I was worried about my grades.

There’s a magic number called a PSA, which stands for Prostate Specific Antigen. It tells the doctors how the cancer is growing and it can fluctuate even if you don’t have cancer. This is what I’ve been told. Basically PSA is relative for everyone and my father’s PSA stayed stable for two years. It didn’t go up for those two years, which was awesome. I would come home during the summer and he would be pretty normal, taking his medications and going to work. The problem is you don’t know how long this will last. Every doctor’s visit could bring bad news of a PSA increase. What was irritating was the next doctor’s visit could tell us if the increase from the previous doctor’s visit was permanent or just a slight increase that will decrease over time. I’m a person who likes definitive answers and this didn’t sit well with me. I hate uncertainty. He dealt with it fine though. He was upbeat (at least to me) and all was well at the doctor’s visits. “Well” being a relative term of course. Dad retired in October 2001, got a nice retirement party and was happy to be able to do what he wanted all day once he retired. This was the most liberated I can remember him being. He woke up, had coffee, spent the day running errands with my mom and enjoying life. He took a photography class and became a good photographer, researched our family’s history and became a really knowledgeable Civil War buff. I was happy for him, but always knew there would come a day when things changed.

Things changed around Winter 2001. His PSA began to go up slightly and the doctor said the cancer was growing. It had begun metastasizing. Long story short, the response to this growth was going to be chemotherapy, which is basically poisoning the human body to kill the cancer. This was the answer to combating the metastasis. I hated this answer. To me, this was like complaining of your arm hurting for a few days and the solution to be cutting off your arm. I saw chemotherapy as what happens when a terminally ill cancer patient doesn’t have any other options left over and doctors are just buying time and making the patient comfortable until death occurs. Maybe that was my non-medical expert opinion of it. This was the beginning of the end and we all knew it. He was given 5-10 years and it had been less than three years. That meant he would have to undergo chemotherapy for almost two years possibly even to meet the five year mark for survival. I was thinking the 5 year mark is where things would start going downhill. Damn me for being an optimist.

So Dad would go to chemo and then come back absolutely exhausted. It was around the beginning of 2002 that I started to see small signs of where this was ultimately headed. He started calling me the wrong person’s name a little more frequently. He called me by his twin brother’s name occasionally, but it got worse around this time. He referred to me as “Dad” (his father was still alive at this point) or even called me by my sister’s name. I’ve gotten called a girl’s name a few times in my life, but I never thought my father would be the one doing it. He did not make this mistake overly frequently, but it became noticeable. He grew tired (as well he should) doing everyday activities and he had to hire someone to take care of the lawn since he didn’t have the energy to do it. He and I always took care of the lawn together and he was adamant that no one was going to take care of his yard but him. Sure, our yard was mostly weeds with divots from me practicing golf, but it was our weeds and our divots. We mowed the weeds and forgot to replace the divots, that's how it was supposed to be. I knew that was a sort of turning point when he couldn’t do yardwork anymore. It was hard to see and I probably didn’t come home as often as I could/should from college. It wasn’t because I didn’t love him or didn’t want to be with him. I got depressed going home to see my family. I got excited to come home, then got depressed while I was there. I spent the summer after undergraduate graduation before graduate school renting an apartment at Appalachian State and basically having the time of my life. I was running away though. I knew it at the time too. My dad always claimed to understand when I spent a weekend at home that summer and then went back to the mountains even though I had nowhere specific to be.

I wasn’t a bad son and didn’t treat anyone poorly, but while my mom worked that summer taking my father to chemotherapy and my sister spent time with him, I wasn’t there as much. I’m still not sure if I feel guilt about this or not. The end didn’t scare me. It was the lead-up to the end that scared me. Just as you take joy in watching your child’s first step, first word, and the slow progressions of that child becoming more and more mature and adult-like as he/she ages, the very opposite of this progression is devastating and crippling in some ways. The man who used to play me at one-on-one basketball and throw the baseball with me in the front yard now needed a ramp instead of stairs to get up on the porch and couldn’t drive a manual transmission car anymore. Yeah, I knew this would happen at some point, but he was barely 50 years old and I had just gotten out of college. It felt like this was all happening a bit too early. I couldn’t see these things on a daily basis.

I recall coming home from school one weekend in Fall 2003. My mom had been mentioning about how my father would always talk to “Sam” while they were both undergoing chemotherapy. I had heard this “Sam” guys name from my dad a few times and had frankly paid enough attention to know the guy’s name, but not enough attention to delve further. My father’s best friend’s was named Sam and he had brain cancer, so I thought at first maybe it was that Sam. Anyway, that one weekend when I came home my mom informed me that “Sam” was Sam Mills, ex-Carolina Panthers linebacker and current coach for the Panthers (he sent my family a card after my father passed away and took the time to write something personal in it. Sam Mills was just a good guy). Sam Mills had recently been diagnosed with intestinal cancer. His prognosis was grim, much like my father's prognosis. While my mom wanted to talk about Sam’s personal life, I was thrilled he got to see one of my favorite Panthers players (while in chemotherapy…I was thrilled to know my father could attend chemo with Sam Mills. It sounds insensitive to think and write down) and started peppering my dad with questions about the current season from Sam Mills' point of view, none of which he could answer. You are sitting in a room with Sam Mills, why aren’t you asking him questions about the current team, about his experiences in the NFL, or pretty much anything sports-related? The idea was unfathomable to me.

My father explained to me they had never discussed football once while at chemotherapy. They always talked about their respective experience with cancer, life in general, and about their families. Sam Mills was an NFL position coach (Linebackers coach at the time for Carolina) and my dad didn’t talk about the current season (in which Carolina was eventually headed to the Super Bowl) or his career with him? Sam Mills? The same passionate guy I saw on the field for several years with Carolina and New Orleans didn’t bring this up? My dad never really explained to me, but I figured out pretty quickly why they never discussed football or Mills’ career. It wasn’t important really. What was important was coming back to chemo the next week and the week after that and the week after that and seeing the same people at the same time on a weekly basis. Monotony and repetition became a form of progress. If you are back the next week, that means you are winning the battle at that point and that’s all that matters. You are present. I remember people used to tell my father it was good to see him and he always responded with, “It’s good to be seen."

By Winter 2004, that’s all that mattered to him, just being seen. The chemotherapy wasn’t working as much anymore. He missed the second half of the Carolina-New England Super Bowl due to physical complications from the chemotherapy during the week. He no longer responded within a day or so to my emails about possible job opportunities I found. It was decided by his doctors that continuing with chemotherapy was probably going to be counterproductive at this point. Ultimately though it was my dad’s call to stop the chemotherapy. The cancer was growing and wasn’t going to stop. He was tired and didn’t want to deal with chemotherapy anymore. At this point he no longer could go upstairs. His daily devotional still lays on his office desk bookmarked to March 2004, the date when he last made it upstairs to his office to read it. He had a hospital bed moved downstairs and moved around the house in a wheel chair. When I graduated from grad school in May 2004, he wasn’t able to attend my graduation because he couldn’t travel at that point. I came home May 10, 2004 after graduation and he could barely talk. Hospice was making visits nearly every day to help take care of him. Cancer had beaten him at this point. We all knew that. He knew that. Time was his enemy. We just had to be around in order to be with him.

May 18^th was a Tuesday. We had dinner and my father could barely move his mouth at this point. He still could make faces at the prospect of eating my mom’s cooking though…a 24 year long running joke continued until the end. My father’s corny jokes became more creative at this point given the degree of difficulty in physically being able to make the joke. After dinner, my mother informed my sister and me that my father was hanging on because he thought he had to. That he was ready to die, but was waiting for some approval from us that we will be fine. I have no idea how she came upon this information. I don’t know if my father told my mother, if it was information understood between them in only a way people who have been married for 26 years can understand or the hospice nurse told my mom. Either way, it wasn’t happening. I wasn’t giving him permission to die. “Fuck that,” I said. “No way, I’m not giving him permission to go. I will absolutely not do that. I’m not ready.” That's a direct quote. My sister said something to the effect of, “But Ben, he is ready.” These words touched me so much, I stormed out of the room, went back downstairs, ignored further attempts to talk about it and finished watching Randy Johnson of the Arizona Diamondbacks throw a perfect game against the Braves with my dad somewhat focused on the game in front of the television in his wheelchair. Yeah, after a lifetime of watching Braves games together, the last game we saw together the Braves didn’t get a runner on-base.

Ultimately, at the end of the baseball game I saw where he was at physically. I was holding back words and preventing my father from achieving some sense of complete peace with his fate. I was doing this because I was more scared than he was. He needed to know we’d be fine without him and I needed to lie to him and say he had my permission to die. Well, he didn’t have my permission but I had to give it to him anyway. So I did. I went downstairs with the idea of speaking to him and giving him permission to die. I thought he would fight me when I gave him permission and he would say, “I’m not ready to go. I’ll be around next week.” Then he would have a bold look in his eye and I would know he was still ready to fight. Maybe that’s what I hoped. A part of me also thought he’d look at me and start yelling at me for wanting him dead. I could see him screaming at me, “I RAISED YOU AND NOW THINGS GET A LITTLE ROUGH, SO YOU ASK ME TO DIE SO YOU CAN MOVE ON? SCREW YOU! BY THE WAY, YOU WERE ADOPTED, WE LAUGHED AS WE PUT YOUR DOG TO SLEEP AND WE LOVED YOUR SISTER MORE THAN YOU!” Granted, he couldn’t speak too much at this point, but there was an outside chance this was the worst practical joke ever played on someone. It didn’t happen that way. He was ready to go and I spoke to him telling him it was okay to be ready. During the end of the conversation, he whispered to me, “I’m sorry for leaving you with the Braves.” One last joke about Randy Johnson’s perfect game and the Braves seeming ability to frustrate us at times. I told him it was fine, but I was lying. I preferred he did not leave me with the Braves. I went upstairs and spoke with my sister for an hour and eventually went to bed. I thought we’d have another week or so of my father around the house. It wasn't to be that way.

My father passed away the next morning at 10:34am. I was woken up and was told if I wanted to talk to him while he was still conscious I needed to do so now. So I got up and we stood by his hospital bed downstairs as he took his last few breaths. It was really sad and there was no last words really, he just slowly stopped breathing. When the funeral home came to get his body our family dog, Toby, refused to let them take my father’s body. He sat on my father’s legs and intermittently howled and barked at their attempts to take his body to the funeral home. Apparently Toby did not ever have the “It’s all right to die” conversation with my father and didn’t feel okay with it all. The funeral was planned by my father, so there wasn’t much my family had to do. It must be difficult to plan your own funeral and think the next time you see the casket you picked out, you won’t see it because you will be dead. That’s why I want to be cremated and have my ashes thrown in Kim Kardashian’s face at a social event. I figure I won’t have to be buried and can get my 15 minutes of fame after I die.

I got the opportunity to speak at my dad’s funeral. Honestly, I enjoyed it. It may sound weird, but the opportunity to speak about my father and what he meant to me was a chance I would never pass up. I spoke for 10 minutes. It didn’t feel that long and fortunately the organist did not start to play me off stage at the five minute mark. People tell me they could never speak at their parent’s funeral, but I wanted to talk for two hours. You see how much I write here. I love an audience, especially when discussing a topic close to my heart. I hated the circumstances, but I enjoyed sharing memories of my father.

Not to do much navel-gazing, but it isn’t the big events anymore where I miss him the most. You do, but for really big events I tend not to think about things like that because you are pretty busy. It is the small things you miss the most. This sounds stupid, but I really wish he could have seen the movie “Anchorman.” He would have loved that movie. I thought about him just a bit on my wedding day, not much more than that mostly because I was so focused on the ceremony going well, making sure I didn’t have to visit the restroom during the wedding (it’s the little things, but if I had to piss or crap during the wedding I can’t imagine how awkward/uncomfortable that would have been). As we all know, when life is going fast, there isn’t much time to think. The little reminders over the last 8 years are the hardest. I want him around to meet my wife, to help my mom decide between a shower door or shower curtain, to help her replace the front door and to see his grandson. If he were here I wouldn’t have to answer the question from a five year old about why his grandfather isn’t coming up to visit him with his grandmother. There's no solid answer in preparation for that question.

My mom has his office the exact same way that he left it. It doesn’t take an amateur psychologist to figure why she hasn’t packed his stuff up or cleaned the desk off. It actually sounds sad to think his stuff hasn’t been touched, but it is actually pretty disgusting. You’d be surprised at how much dust can accumulate over a few years. Even the spiders and cockroaches avoid his desk for fear their legs will get stuck in the film of dust laying over most of the objects still on his desk. The pens don’t write anymore, but still that desk is there with a book about dealing with impending death and the grief that goes along with it sitting on the left side. As far as I know, he’s the only one who ever read it. The bookcase has awkward pictures of me and my sister as we were growing up, pictures of our family, and plaques for all sorts of events/achievements. I’m not sure how he could even do any work in his office without laughing at the picture of me as a late blooming 15 year old with spots of acne on my face. Perhaps he got his laughs in when I wasn’t looking. Still, the desk sits there as a dusty memorial of sorts.

My father and I used to watch as many Braves games together as possible. He would get home from work and I would ask him if he was going to be able to watch the Braves game with me. It wasn’t a “thing” at the time, but in retrospect it sort of was a “thing.” I preferred to watch games with him more than I enjoyed watching them with my friends. Even to this day, sometimes it feels weird watching a Braves game without him around. You would think I’d be over that by now. He told me towards the end of his life he regretted we never had a beer together. Beer just tore his stomach apart by the time I got to legal drinking age and it was one of the drinks he had to avoid later in his life for that reason. I told him we did have a beer together when watching the Braves game, but just not in the literal sense. It was a terribly cheesy line, and I do realize that, but I only think of my really good lines after an hour or two of thinking about them some more.

Even 8 years after his death, I feel silly for still missing him. He’s been gone so long, so much has happened. Everyone’s moved on but you. At a certain point you tell yourself you should stop thinking about it. It sounds reasonable in theory, but hard to do in practice. When NC State made the Sweet Sixteen this year, I couldn’t help but think how excited that would have made dad. He would love Lorenzo Brown and C.J. Leslie, while being petrified Mark Gottfried was in some way cheating or working around NCAA rules to bring in his great 2012 recruiting class. We used to talk sports a fair amount and even to this day I see a sports story and think “Man, I wish I could talk about that with my dad.” Sports have tied us together permanently in that way. I will think of him during a sporting event and wonder what he would have thought.

My dad wasn’t my best friend. He was my father and of course I think he was awesome. There are many quirky/funny stories I could tell you about him, but 90% of people think that their dad is awesome and have similar stories. That’s why I will spare you these stories. I’m not Bill Simmons. I didn’t call my father after every victory or defeat waiting for him to say something funny so I can tell everyone. There’s nothing wrong with doing this, of course. He spent most of my youth working hard, I spent much of my teen years wanting to be away from any parental oversight, and I spent most of the years he had cancer in college away from home. We did play golf together quite frequently throughout college and when I was younger. So we did play sports and attend sports together. We attended Game 3 of the 1993 Conference Semifinals between the Hornets and Knicks. It was a double overtime game and probably rates as one of my top sporting events attended. It definitely rates as the loudest crowd I have ever heard live at a sporting event. I saw a replay of the game on NBA TV a few months ago and just couldn’t stop watching. While watching the game on television I kept thinking this is what cancer robbed me of, while also having a great memory of being there with my father. This is the time we would both have had to attend these sporting events. I’m out of college and he would be retired. Would we attend a bunch of sporting events together? I don’t know. It’s entirely possible, but I wish the option was still there.

I hate prostate cancer. I hate it with a passion. No one really likes cancer, so that sounds obvious. I am tied to prostate cancer in a way though. The odds of me getting prostate cancer are really, really high. My dad had it, his twin brother had it, and their father had it. Only my father died from it. So I have a good chance of surviving it if caught early enough. I am having my PSA checked every two years until I’m 40, even though my doctor says this is overkill. It doesn’t matter to me. If I am unlucky enough to receive a prostate cancer diagnosis at some point in my life though I am going to absolutely kick its ass. I’m going to kick its ass for my father, for myself, for my wife, for my sister and my mother. I will retire with my wife, meet my grandchildren, and talk sports with them until they are tired of talking to me or my mind starts to go and I become convinced Brian McCann was a pitcher. I couldn’t do anything for my father in helping him beat the disease, but I’m going to ensure it won’t defeat me the way it defeated him. This is the best way I know to honor him, knowing I was able to do anything and everything that cancer robbed him of participating in with us. I’ll take my children and grandchildren to a game and have a beer with them. Maybe I’ll even buy an extra one.