I told you in my last post I was going to be reflecting on my working life and recording some thoughts here. I also told you it would not be something I would expect you to read if you were not inclined to do so because it's probably way too much about me. Putting myself in the reader's place, frankly, I don't know if I would read it.
So, feel free to skim or skip this installment entirely. It will not hurt my feelings in the least.
Before I start, I will tell you I am one week into retirement, and it took me less than a week to make the joke about not knowing when I had time to work.
I have filled my days with deferred projects such as taking old paint to the landfill, making a couple of trips to Goodwill and doing some straightening up in the garage. I still don't feel I am in a routine or rhythm yet, but I am confident I'll get there.
I told Wife there are definite things I miss about work (mainly the people), but there are certainly things I do not miss. So far, the things I don't miss outweigh the things I do.
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From age 16 through my college years, I had various jobs. I won't go into all of them here but will tell you my favorite was when I worked in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado the summers of 1980 and 1981, which were the summers after my senior year of college and first year of law school, respectively. All of that probably deserves a separate post but suffice it to say this was my "adventure" job and not only did I have the time of my life and make some great friends, but I also grew up a lot. Again, I will save elaboration on this for another day.
I majored in journalism in college, which was a liberal arts degree. With that, I had a lot of electives. I filled those mostly with English classes and even some music classes after I had all the basic stuff out of the way my freshman and sophomore years. I also got academic credit from working on the school newspaper and served in editorial positions my junior and senior years, for which I also received a very small salary.
I loved working on the paper and appreciated all the opportunities it afforded me. The head of the journalism department served as publisher and advisor for the paper, and he became a good friend. My fellow editors and reporters were good friends too.
But for whatever reason, I could not see newspaper work as a long-term career. And I never worked in that business other than what I did on the school paper. Looking back, I think maybe I did not have the passion for it to work the long hours, which would have included nights and weekends, that would have been required to work my way up and make a decent living. This is really past-tense speculation on my part, because I don't remember the reasons for many of the decisions I made at the time.
I always had in mind that I would apply to law school. I had an interest in government and politics, and I thought it would be good to have some type of profession. I certainly did not have the aptitude for math and science to have been a doctor or dentist, or the analytical acumen to be an engineer.
So, I took the Law School Admissions Test and applied to several different law schools. I went to college in Louisiana, so I applied to a law school there (LSU in Baton Rouge). I was an Arkansan, so I applied to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and also the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR), which I ended up attending. I also applied to the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) and I could not tell you why. Maybe I was covering all my bases in case some of them didn't want me? Who knows, but I don't remember even remotely considering attending law school in Mississippi.
I got in all the schools but, as I said, I chose UALR. I had always been an Arkansan, and Little Rock was a couple of hours from my hometown, so it seemed a good choice.
Law school was a shock for me. Although everything worked out and I am confident God was looking out for me, if I had it to do over again, I would not go to law school right out of college. I was woefully immature and unprepared. Besides that, I am embarrassed to tell you I really did not have a good understanding of what lawyers do, and there I was studying to be one.
It is no exaggeration to say I was miserable that first year. I struggled with the classes and with making friends. Although I probably should have been considering internships or clerking positions, all I wanted to do was go back to Colorado for the summer. And that is what I did.
Things got better during my second year. I still didn't love it, but I found my stride.
Mid-way through my second year I got a job with a law firm, an insurance defense firm, and I worked for them through graduation. They were not, however, offering me a permanent position.
Although I never knocked it out of the park academically, I managed to graduate. And I made some friends.
I applied for a law clerking job with a circuit judge in Little Rock and that was my first job out of law school.
I liked the job, and I liked the judge I worked for. I did legal research and I even served as judge (appointed as a "special master" under a state law) on small cases. (The first time someone called me "your honor," I looked around to see who they were talking to.)
Although there was no mandatory end-date, the life span for those jobs was generally a year to 18 months.
After one year, however, I chose to marry rather than look for a job. But not long after returning from my honeymoon, I began to look for something else. I had come to know a number of lawyers during my time in the court and started to spread the word.
I ended up leaving the court in December of '84 and going to work for a guy who became and still is one my closest friends. He had been a lawyer with the Arkansas Attorney General's office and went to work under contract with the Arkansas Insurance Department working on the liquidation of a very large Arkansas-domiciled insurance company. He needed another lawyer and he hired me.
It was interesting work and, as I noted, I gained a close friend. Although he was six years older, we were both in the midst of starting families. In that respect, we grew up together.
When I go back to Little Rock, whenever possible, I try to see him. We have gone from being young dads to being grandfathers. We always pick up where we left off.
That job lasted three years and from there it was on to the practice of law in a law firm. By this time I had, in fact, learned what lawyers do. Unfortunately, I had also learned I cared little for it. I am by nature conflict-avoidant, and I spent a big part of my days fighting with people.
Even with my distaste for the work, I developed expertise in finance and real estate law. My clients were banks and mortgage companies. I also did some family law work such as divorces and adoptions. Although the clients seemed to like me, I tended to get too personally involved with them. Let's face it, what they were going through was emotional and it was hard for me to separate myself from that. I tried to treat the divorces as business transactions, but that was difficult. (Interestingly, though, because of that experience, over the years as I have had friends who have gone through divorces, I have advised them to, as much as possible, treat it as a business transaction.)
Through my work with banks, I got to know some people in town who had formed a small financial services company. They offered me a job as their general counsel. I won't bore you (any more than I already am doing so) with all the details, but we serviced mortgages, collected on debt and eventually got into auto financing. I did a lot of contract and transactional work and experienced less conflict than I had with my work at the law firm. I felt I had finally found my niche.
This is the job that brought me to the Nashville area in late 1997, the one that I thought would be my long-term career. The joke was on me. In the spring of 1998, that company was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy and eventually went out of business.
In what undoubtedly involved the hand of God, before I left the company (I stayed on a few months after the bankruptcy filing), the acting CEO at the time, a Nashville native, came to me and said he felt really bad for what had happened, that I had uprooted my family and moved to a new place for a job that was not working out.
He said he would do anything he could to help me and asked that I give him my resume, which he would share with others.
The next day, I got a call from the chief compliance officer of a bank in Nashville. Later that day I was in his office for an interview. The next week I was offered a job in the bank's legal department.
And thus began my career in banking, which became a perfect fit. A year after I went to work there, that bank was acquired by a bank in Alabama. The legal departments consolidated, with part of it being in Nashville. I stayed with them until 2005.
Again sparing the minute details, that year I went to work for another bank in another legal department. I enjoyed it a great deal, but there was one aspect of it that made it tricky. That bank was headquartered in Memphis, three hours west of Nashville, where I live. Rather than move to Memphis, I rented a tiny apartment there and commuted most weeks from Monday to Thursday, usually spending three nights a week there. I worked from home on Fridays.
Remote working was not near the thing it is today, so my working offsite one day a week was a big deal. My manager and my manager's manger were both skeptical, but I proved it could be done and after about a year, it was a non-issue.
I received no small amount of unsolicited feedback during those years from well-meaning people who thought the commute was too much for me. It taught me how important it is to mind one's own business. I knew I would not do it forever, but at the time it worked. I looked at it as an adventure of sorts. I loved my little downtown apartment. If it had not worked for me and for my family, I would have quit.
I am sure I was less than polite to some of those who gave me the unsolicited advice, but I tired of hearing how hard it must be on me, because it wasn't.
And I was right that it would not last forever. In early summer of 2015, after ten years of commuting to Memphis, I had dinner with the same person who had hired me in 1998, now the chief compliance officer of yet another bank that succeeded the two I had previously worked for. Near the end of that dinner, we had come to a tentative agreement for me to come to work there, this time managing a group of compliance professionals.
By August I was there. Oh, and this bank was also headquartered in another city -- this one in Birmingham, Alabama, about three hours south of here. So, there would again be a commute.
This one was different though, with much more flexibility, and my signing package included money toward the travel. A co-worker offered me use of his guest house when I was in town. That lasted for about a year and a half and after that I started staying in different Airbnbs, which was a lot of fun. After a couple of years, I was going two to three days a week, and usually out only two nights.
In 2019, Younger Son moved to Birmingham and he and I worked out a deal in which I stayed with him. He got a two-bedroom apartment, and I helped with the rent. Then came COVID.
When COVID hit in 2020, I came home to work, and I never went back. Since March of that year, I have worked 100 percent remotely. I have some thoughts on all of that which I will share another time.
(By the way, when I took this job that also involved commuting, the nay-sayers mostly retreated. Or they at least kept their thoughts to themselves.)
Management changed a couple of years ago. My good friend that hired me retired, as did my immediate manager. But I still had a good team of people who reported to me, and I still mostly enjoyed the work.
The past decade has been the best of my career. I have thoroughly enjoyed the work and the people and consider myself immensely blessed.
Wife retired six years ago. She and I have been preparing for my retirement, and now it is here. Although the effective date is December 1st, I wrapped things up a week ago.
I second-guessed myself a lot over the years. Maybe I should not have gone to law school, I would think to myself. Maybe all of this was something I was not cut out for.
I will concede I was not well prepared for law school. I should have done more prior research about what I was getting myself into.
I am leaving out plenty about circumstances surrounding the job changes and transitions, some of the stress and anguish that accompanied all of it.
Today, looking back, I know some things. I am grateful for my legal education. Maybe my temperament was not that of a typical lawyer (certainly not a litigator) but knowing how things work from a legal perspective has proved to be invaluable on many occasions.
Once I got into transactional work, dealing less with conflicting parties, I had found my place. And the past ten years, also working in a management role, has allowed me to use more of my strengths.
At one time or another, I said to each of my three children that work is not supposed to be easy and that is why you get paid for it. Stress and uncertainly come with the territory. Learning to navigate that ends up being a big part of one's working life -- or at least it did for me.
Throughout this post I have made reference to friends I made at work. Without a doubt, that has been the best part about it. More than anything else (other than the pay, of course) during my working years, I value the relationships I formed.
I have also not gone into detail about the move from Arkansas to Tennessee in 1997. From the outside, I probably looked foolish moving myself and my family here. But I know it ended up being a wonderful place to live and Wife and I are extremely happy here.
I will continue to look back, I am sure, as time passes and I settle into a new sense of normal. Right now, when people ask me how I feel since I have retired, I have a one-word answer: grateful.
