My first job in the Big Apple, working for a small financial firm located in the Rockefeller Center area, didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. It did provide me with some important lessons on the reality of business life in the corporate environment, which was quite different than working for an academic institution. It also allowed me to find a nice apartment in Summit, New Jersey, probably the most pleasant place I've lived since leaving my parents' house. After a year at my first job, it was apparent that things weren't working out too well, so the company let me go, again with a pretty generous severance package, and I found myself rather at loose ends for the summer of 1995.
I took my time looking for work, and spent most of the summer relaxing, riding trains and my bike around New Jersey, and thinking hard about what I really wanted to do with my life from that point on. I used the opportunity to get a lot of laziness out of my system, and by around mid-August I'd read all the books, and played all the games of Civilization, that I could reasonably want. I realized that if I didn't have a job by the end of September, I wouldn't be able to afford to go to Philcon, which would just be totally unacceptable. So I stepped up the job search, and just after Labor Day weekend, I found myself a technical writing position with Cantor Fitzgerald, a brokerage house located in the World Trade Center.
Working for Cantor was an education in itself, and once again I gained a great deal of valuable experience from my time there. The assignment, which was obtained through a consulting firm, was originally for a two-month temporary job, but things worked out well enough that my employment became pretty much open-ended. I also began getting more involved in the New York City life when I began working downtown. I decided to revive my interest in the acoustic music scene, and began doing volunteer work for the Fast Folk Cafe, a musical performance space in the Tribeca neighborhood that features some of the best modern acoustic artists (yes, that was a shameless plug). I also joined the Upper West Side Internet Users' Group, which eventually became the New York Metropolitan Area Internet Users' Group, and met some very interesting fellow Internet folks through that group.
I spent a total of about a year and a half working for Cantor, but by the end of 1996, some other interesting job opportunities were beginning to come my way. In February, I decided to accept one of the offers, and as of March 1997, began working at Progressive Strategies, a technology evaluation firm based in midtown Manhattan.
So that's the story so far, as briefly as possible. No doubt there will be plenty more to add to it in the future.
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