I was born on leap-year day in 1976, making me about seven years old (or 32, depending on how you look at it) at the writing of this bio. Born in the south on the east coast and leaving the state of Carolina when I was four, I was raised in the suburbs of Colosse, Delosa with my two older brothers. My father was a civilian auditor working for the United States Air Force, performing cost analyses on airplane engineering designs. My mother was president of the PTA, a tireless volunteer, and homemaker.
I went to an upper middle class high school chalk full of the sons and daughters of engineers. The average student’s car at my High School was worth twice that of the average teacher’s. Both of my parents grew up dirt poor so what money we had was spent only with great trepidation, but thankfully we were never left wanting. Even so, I never had the nicest clothes and sometimes I’d have to take an extra set of clothes because my car frequently lacked air conditioning to protect me from the hot southern sun. I owe my disdain for conspicuous consumption to how I was raised.
When I graduated from high school I enrolled at Southern Tech University because of their College of Industrial Technology, which offered programs many larger and more prestigious universities did not. I majored in Computer Information Systems (CIS) and minored in Institutional Supervision. Shortly before starting at SoTech, I met and began a serious relationship with a girl named Julie Bernard. My relationship with Julie was unusually stable for our age and, with the exception of my senior year, denied me the “college experience” and the nigh-certain insanity that probably would have come with it. I don’t regret my time with Julie, though looking back I would have bailed out a lot earlier than I did.
In addition to a full-time courseload and a full-time girlfriend, for a long stretch I also had a full time at a computer reseller named SouthStar CRI. I served as a “y2K Coordinator”, wherein my job was to give my employer an insurance discount for having someone dedicated to coordinating Y2K issues, and as a Night Operator, where my job was to avoid falling asleep while performing system backups and batch processes at night. Eventually SouthStar sold off their computer division and sales division, leaving me wondering what exactly it is that the company did until I was laid off.
The local economy had hit the skids and finding work was difficult. Lacking work, finding a girlfriend proved pretty hard, too. The first problem was settled when a SoTech alum hired me to be the solo IT person for Wildcat, his small oil refinery products engineering and manufacturing company. The second problem was alleviated, though not solved, by Evangeline Pierce. Eva brought me out of an increasing despondency and into a whirlwind of fury, hurt, and confusion. We parted for the third and final time three years later, by which point I had lost the job at Wildcat.
Unemployed and somewhat bitter, it’s amazing that I met and became involved in Clancy Himmelreich, a soon-to-graduate medical student, at all. We quickly partnered up and the prospect of marriage was almost immediately discussed. During this time I worked briefly for a company called Bregna, infamous in the Colosse area as the worst employer in town.
Clancy and I got married and moved to the Mormon-dominated western state of Deseret, where she began her residency. After a series of part-time and temporary jobs, I began work for the Falstaff Corporation, which handles administrative chores for companies too small or too cheap to handle their on HR matters. It was working for that bizarre company that inspired me to start a pseudononymous blog and start writing about it. In August 2006 we relocated to the southwestern state of Estacado, where we spent a couple of years. Clancy delivered high-risk babies into the world while I made sure that computer software and hardware works correctly. For six months or so Clancy worked out west and we lived 1,000 miles or so apart three weeks of every month.
In July of 2008 we relocated again to the Pacific northwestern state Cascadia. Rather quickly after the move, I got a job at Mindstorm, one of the larger and more well-known software companies out there. I am a Software Quality Assurance Engineer for software that goes on Mindstorm’s portable multimedia device, the Stormcast. The job is fine, but the three hours a day I spend in the car are killing me.
I have two older brothers. My older brother Oliver (or Ollie) is a database programmer living down the street from my parents with his wife Kelsey and daughter Sadie. Mitch, the middle brother, is an aeronautical engineer and also lives in the Mayne area with his wife Brynn.
Ollie and Kelsey are proud parents of a daughter born in early 2008 named Sadie Lane Truman. At present, none of our other siblings plan to reproduce. Clancy and I plan to start trying within the next year or so.
Clancy has two younger sisters, one of which (Ellie, the middle daughter) is currently living in the Northwest Territories of Canada as an environmental legal analyst and the other (Zoey, the younger daughter) doing Peace Corps work in Africa.
[Most recently edited on 2/16/9]