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Thursday, January 13, 2011

timing is the key to success

You could read this story as about the random events that changed my life, and it certainly is that, but it is also about how we need to recognize and seize opportunities when they appear before us.

I had been working as a UPS delivery driver on Manhattan’s Lower East Side for 18 years, working the same route “forever” to the point that I probably knew more about the people currently living and working in those 21 square blocks than anyone else walking this earth. It was early December, 1989.

I was a child of the 60’s passionate about social justice. I went to work at UPS to get union pay and to be in an industry vital to the commerce of NYC where I could agitate and organize the workers. I learned a lot of life lessons and made many good friends in that diverse workplace but the revolution did not come. Many years later I was supporting a family, paying alimony and accumulating the aches and pains of the years of physical work.

I was not the shop steward, leaving that function to another who wanted the extra overtime that went with handling grievances, but I was sought out for my counsel and advice about what grievances to raise.

For several years I had been teaching myself about computers.

I had a storefront on my route that assembled and sold IBM PC clones. I made this my last pickup stop of the day and would talk with the Asian workers in the back room doing the assembly work while the last shipment was packed up. That’s where I learned about hardware. That’s where I got myself a computer to work with.

I had several delivery stops where I found people with software that I could borrow. I learned the programs usually without having any instruction manual, learning by doing. Sometimes I would get a manual and I could copy it in the office of a small social service agency on my route. The executive director there was an early adopter of computerization and I got to know him through talking shop about computers.

As it happens, there was a woman driver with the route next to mine who was a single mother and didn’t want to work all the standard overtime hours. There was no grievance that could be made about that unless you consistently had more than 10 hours per week and even then what would result from such a grievance is that a supervisor would ride with you trying to get you to work faster. So I gave her a different grievance that I knew would work to get her overtime reduced. And it worked, but management got her to tell them how she knew to make that grievance and as a result, I got punished the next day by having my truck loaded with very many more delivery stops.

I worked until after 11 PM. The bell rings to start work at 8:30 AM so that’s a very long day. When I was knocking on doors late at night, many people disbelieved that it could really be a legitimate delivery. The very next morning I was back at work, parked in front of that social service agency as it happens, in the back of my truck sorting through the packages out for delivery that day when the executive director came out to back of the truck to ask me if I knew anyone who would be interested in taking care of the computers at his agency.

I thought for a second or two and then asked: “What about me?”

“Oh, no,” he said, “We can’t afford you.”

But my oldest daughter was in her senior year of college and my expenses would be going down, so I told him that we should talk about it. And I ended up switching jobs for somewhat lower pay and starting a new career. And while working for that social service agency I developed a database to track their chart records and everything else going on at the agency and that database was adopted by other social service agencies using servers hosted in my office and then the software became a free standing company 10 years later and the software is now hosted in a data center and used by over 500 agencies some 21 years after that day.

If I hadn’t worked past 11 PM the night before, chances are that I wouldn’t have proposed myself to do that job.

As it turns out, my managers at UPS gave me a gift when they overloaded my truck with those deliveries and I got a huge reward for giving my co-worker that grievance to make. And again some years later it was my good fortune that my current business partners found me and it was the right time for them to take a risk and they imagined this company that has delivered on our mission to do good and do well.

I am reminded of a small sign I saw on the desk of a man who signed for a delivery I made to him every morning: “Timing is the Key to Success.”