Category: personal

In 2016 I took a memorable trip to New York City with my colleagues from Chain. Nasdaq and Chain cohosted a conference to educate finance nerds about blockchain technology.

We spent the weekend before the conference doing fun New York things, together and separately. On Saturday morning we got a wonderful docent-led tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A highlight of that tour was the Temple of Dendur, a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian structure donated to the U.S. in the 1960’s. It is exhibited in a special gallery at the north end of the museum, whose north face is a canted glass wall. Our tour guide asked if any of us could guess why. I speculated that a wealthy patron wanted to be able to see it from their nearby Fifth Avenue penthouse. I was exactly right, and got a high-five from the guide. Jacqueline Kennedy was instrumental in securing the temple for the Met, beating out the Smithsonian and other sites, and got to gaze down at it for years afterward. (Her passion for it derived from the efforts she and JFK made during his presidency to rescue Egyptian antiquities from destruction due to the Aswan Dam. The gift of the temple from Egypt was in gratitude for that.)

Later in the day we were talking about the musical Hamilton, which was then a brand-new and unprecedented sensation. Only our CEO Adam had seen it, on a New York trip a few months before, but it captivated him and he brought it up often. A line from one of its songs — “In the face of ignorance and resistance I wrote financial systems into existence” — appeared at the bottom of our company stationery, since it is what we imagined we ourselves were doing. I mentioned that I’d pieced together some things I’d read about the show’s creator and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, to conclude not only that he’d attended my old high school, but that he’d developed his performing and playwriting skills as part of The Brick Prison Playhouse, the repertory group that my friends and I created there in the early 80’s. (I had only recently become aware that The Brick Prison Playhouse still exists.) My colleague Boyma gave me a high-five on hearing that news.

At dinner the topic of childraising came up. Almost all of my colleagues were young and childless; I was the old man of the group. Thanks to nieces and nephews, godsons and -daughters, babysitting gigs and the like, everyone had some child-caregiving experience to share. Uncommonly kind and positive as this group was, their stories nevertheless tended toward the kids-are-frustrating-and-exhausting end of the spectrum. So I chimed in: everything worthwhile takes energy and effort; the rewards vastly outweigh the challenges; and as my mom told me when I first became a parent, it just keeps getting better. My colleague Oleg — the one other parent of the group — loved this sentiment so much he high-fived me.

To be clear, my usual number of unsolicited high-fives in a day is zero. April 9th, 2016 was a significant outlier.

---

Postscript. At the successful conclusion of the conference at Nasdaq’s headquarters, Adam marched us three blocks uptown to the Richard Rodgers theater for a group viewing of Hamilton. It blew our minds — the show itself, of course, but also that Adam was even able to do this for all of us. Those were the hottest tickets in town, and the scarcest, and the priciest. To this day I have no idea how he did it.

When I started high school, my dad gave me his old combination lock to use on my locker: a vintage Dudley. It stood out among the identical modern Master locks that most of my classmates had, and I was proud of it.

That lock followed me to college, where it sat mostly unused until I decided, some time in my senior year, that I was getting flabby and needed to start exercising. At that point I began swimming laps regularly, and I used the lock to keep my swim things in a locker at the gym.

I graduated, but I remained at college for work, and I started dating Andrea. (Today, that woman is my wife.) She took more and more of my attention, of course, and I got to the pool less and less often. Still I kept my swim things in the locker there.

At the end of the spring semester, 1989, everyone had to clear out their lockers for the summer. It would have been easy to do − my office was just on the other side of campus − but not yet having learned how to balance work, girlfriend, and other responsibilities and pursuits, I kept putting it off. When I finally got to the pool I discovered I was too late. The lock had been removed and the locker emptied.

I didn’t care about the swimsuit or the towel. But I was devastated to have lost the lock. I thought of it like an heirloom and was consumed with guilt. I live with the echoes of that feeling even today.

The good news is that that lesson is part of what helped me shape up into a more responsible adult.

It was the summer of 1986 and I was in the middle of a one-year suspension from college.

I was the kind of kid with enough natural aptitude that I managed to skate by in school without ever seriously needing to apply myself. I was so good at it, in fact, that I skated right into a high school for gifted students (admission to which was by citywide exam), and then continued to do well enough, if not quite distinguish myself, even though I was now surrounded by some of the brightest and hardest-working students from all five boroughs. There were a few close calls where a research paper or some other assignment actually required prolonged, hard work, and I’d spend weeks with little idea of how even to get started, and then scramble as the deadline approached to produce something terrible that might at least manage to be somewhat acceptable. More than once, making the terrible thing be somewhat acceptable required me to wage a charm offensive on a teacher, talking my way into a passing grade.

By the time I got to college, my lack of work ethic and time-management skills came home to roost. I stayed afloat for a couple of semesters but, by the end of my third, had such poor grades that the Dean’s office suspended me for a year.

I stayed in town during what should have been my fourth semester. While my friends continued to attend classes, I got a job and an apartment, neither of which was very good. I was lonely and unhappy.

Luckily my friend Julie, who was taking the same classes I should have been taking that semester, asked me for help with her schoolwork. And now something changed: although they were challenging, second-year-of-college-level assignments, and although they required applying myself, I did apply myself, and took pleasure in the hard work. I wrote to the Dean about my newfound interest in the material, and my renewed dedication, and arranged an interview with him, in which I convinced him to let me back a semester early.

Still, that might only have been another successful charm offensive, talking my way out of trouble without addressing the underlying problem, if it hadn’t been for what came next.

Summer break arrived and everyone prepared to leave town for a couple of months. My crappy sublet ended and I lined up a new apartment for the fall — a nice one. I rented a storage unit to hold my stuff during the summer and a U-Haul to get it there. Both the storage unit and the U-Haul were too big for my few worldly possessions (my modern clutter-encumbered self recalls wistfully), so I invited some friends — two roommates from a nearby dorm — to share my storage space, and the cost.

Somehow it worked out that they accepted my offer and paid their share without our ever agreeing to also share the work of loading the truck, driving it to the storage unit, and unloading it there. With little more than a “thanks, bye!” they handed me the keys to their dorm room and left town. When I let myself in, I found that in their eagerness to hit the road they hadn’t even bothered to pack up — and dorms had to be vacated by the end of that day.

If this story took place today, I would have simply texted “WTAF!” to my friends and gotten them to return, and help. But in 1986 when you were gone, you were gone. Everyone else I might have enlisted or bribed to help me was gone, too. After an impotent little tantrum — during which I briefly entertained and rejected the spiteful idea of leaving their things in the room and letting the university confiscate them — I realized there was just one thing to do, and no avoiding it: the hard work.

Trying to maintain a modicum of respect for their belongings, I packed up their room into what boxes and bags I could scrounge, and carried them one by one by one to the truck in the rising heat and humidity of an early-summer afternoon in Pittsburgh. Books, papers, clothes, shoes, bed linens, toiletries, beanbag chairs, desk lamps, wall hangings, and more were left to my care. I muttered to myself, and swore, and promised myself that when we all returned in the fall, I would make them do the work. By the time I had their room cleaned out it was late afternoon and the sweat was pouring off me. I knew I had only until 7pm to get everything into storage and return the rental truck, but I felt like I couldn’t lift another thing.

A 30-minute air-conditioned ride to the storage unit revived me, but once I resumed clambering in and out of the truck, hefting unwieldy boxes and bags with the clock ticking, I was quickly back to the edge of despair. Finally, after forever, overheated and underhydrated, I finished. I locked the storage unit, closed the truck, returned it to U-Haul, and collapsed in my denuded apartment, where I slept the sleep of the righteous ahead of my own departure the next day.

Over the summer, I told that story a few times — indignantly at first, at having been left on my own by my thoughtless so-called friends — but shifting after a few retellings to pride at having buckled down and done the work.

When the fall came, I emptied the storage unit by myself and (not without a certain amount of self-satisfaction) brought my friends’ belongings to their door.

My main memory of the months that followed is of hour after hour spent sitting at the desk in my apartment, working through difficult assignments in abstract algebra and digital circuit design and, when I was through with those, contributing articles and cartoons to the school newspaper. I started getting regular exercise, doing laundry before it became a crisis, and cleaning my bathroom ever. I got off the Dean’s shit list and onto the Dean’s List. And I impressed one of my professors enough for him to hire me for a summer internship that turned out to be the start of a decades-long professional career, a career that contains performance review comments like this one: “Bob demonstrates total persistence on the most gnarly tasks.”

To this day, whenever I’m trying to power through some difficult bit of work, I think of a sweaty summer afternoon in Pittsburgh, and the appealing new sensation that was born in me that day, when I had no other choice but to apply myself: self-respect.