You may not remember this, but back in the late 1980’s NASA did most of their space travel with an airplane like spaceship they called the space shuttle. To launch it into orbit they bolted it to a massive tank of propellant with two large rockets on either side. Once in space, the body of the airplane would open up so the astronaughts could unload satellites with a large crane, designed by a Canadian space company. 

Inside the space shuttle there was a collection of zero gravity experiments that were packaged in individual pods. They would be in a dormant state during launch and then start up once the vehicle got to space. The pods were designed by companies and universities doing zero gravity experiments. The length of each experiment was limited to the time that the space shuttle was in space and usually the steps in the experiment were automated with motors and other machines to limit the involvement of astronaughts. Apparently astronaughts have a lot of things to do when they’re up there.

Working on the Space Shuttle

After my third year of engineering school, I had the opportunity to work on one of these zero gravity experiment pods. One of the experiments, on one of these pods, documented the behaviour of crystals as they heated and cooled in zero gravity. A stepper motor moved these tubes into a small furnace to heat up the crystal material and then moved it back into storage to cool.. I designed a motor controller to move these tubes around. I’m still kind of impressed by the uniqueness of that opportunity very early in my engineering career. 

Building this controller to operate on the space shuttle taught me a lot about building something that’s fail proof. I built the solution in a few days and then spent 4 months adjusting, reviewing and testing it. That’s the difference between a quick prototype and a solid product that is ready for space.

Building the Internet

The space shuttle gig was a cool summer job but my last year of university took me into a different type of career. I became an engineer in training (EIT) at Manitoba Telecom Services (MTS). The last position in my EIT was in a very new team that provided computer network services. A few new companies from San Jose California built equipment for connecting computers together into a network and this new team at MTS was trained on how to build these networks. 

I started out meeting with customers and designing their computer network cabling system. All the cables for a customer converged in a communications closet where we installed this new thing called an ethernet switch that moved data from one wire to the next. This made it possible for all the computers in an office to talk with each other. This is when computers started taking on roles and we started using one of the computers as a file server. This approach gave everyone access to the same files without the delay of exchanging an external storage device like a floppy disk or cassette.

A few people on our team started working with another new device called a router. It used data communication links between buildings to route traffic outside an office space to other office spaces. After a few months, the two newest members of the team became the experts on this new router device. I was one of those experts. One of our most important customers became the Government of Manitoba. One of the first Manitoba wide networks that we built was for Child and Family Services, so they could share their files across the whole province. This helped them to identify when people in their system moved from one area to another and allowed them to continue service rather than start over again with a new file.

Soon all the government departments wanted their own province wide network. As we continued to build out these networks it started to get a bit confusing to have multiple versions of site design text files and diagram files in different file servers across MTS. I had read about this thing called a web server where one application (a web browser) could access a variety of different information types like different types of text documents and images. You could even mix these different types of documents into one display with a web page. I got busy one day and built a web server out of a unix workstation that we had in our lab. This workstation could be reached from anywhere inside MTS with a web browser and everyone who was working on the government project could now see the latest design information on our web server. Very cool.

Eventually all the government departments and every big company had their own network that connected all their computers together. At this time it was still quite rare for information to flow outside of a company unless it was put into an email message and sent to a specific person. Some companies started building web servers to share some of their public information outside of the company on something we now know as the Internet or the World Wide Web. 

At first the general public only connected to the Internet using a home phone line. We checked for messages once or twice a day. While we checked for messages we could use a web browser to visit a few well known bulletin boards or company web sites. A few companies like Yahoo started to catalog some of these sites into an index so we didn’t have to keep track of all the useful sites in our browser bookmarks. If you want more stories about the early Internet you’ll have to ask me sometime or look it up on the Yahoo internet catalog which is still around. It has turned into more of a news site than the original Internet site catalog, but it’s the same company.

Startup Dream

During all this work on the Internet I went to work for a company called Cisco Systems who built the original Internet routers that I had learned to use at MTS. I really enjoyed being in the heart of the Internet’s growth. As time went along it felt like I was more and more confined to a small part of the Internet action. It felt like I had become an Internet plumber and I kind of wanted to work with the applications and web pages on the end of the plumbing. The early days of building a web site for my MTS colleagues and solving information access problems seemed very disconnected from my day to day activities of moving data around in the pipes of the Internet.

In the year 2000 I decided to leave Cisco Systems and explore my desire to be an entrepreneur. I spent almost a year trying to build a browser based online app to manage people and strategic planning data for growing organizations. After 12 months I started to realize that an app that is built, sold and supported by one person is a recipe for burnout and never ending stress. The shine had come off the dream of building something from scratch.

Pastor Dream

The year after Cisco while I was building my dream app another childhood idea started bubbling up. Growing up in a strong Christian subculture there was a reverence and honour to being a leader in the church. Although I had been offered board level positions in church, work responsibilities had pulled me out of that role. This is the dream that emerged when SunWest Christian Fellowship approached me about becoming their Operations Director in 2001. I had the opportunity to become a leader in the church like many young Christian men dream about.

I don’t think Nadine and I were prepared for what happened next and even though I had an unspoken dream about leadership in the church, I know that Nadine didn’t. Unfortunately there was an expectation that both of us were now part of the church leadership culture. Over the next 4 years I learned a ton about leadership, strategy and management of people. These lessons at SunWest served me well in the years since. It’s also fair to say that dreams don’t usually account for all the nuances involved and that was the case as I worked hard to step into the role of a Pastor at SunWest. Nadine and I were both relieved when God set me free of my pledge to lead in the church and I chose to go back into a technology company and eventually back to Cisco Systems.

Embracing My DNA

After more than 25 years in the work force, I have changed roles approximately every 2 years. In this article I’ve described a few of those roles and how they shaped me. Over the years I’ve formed a fairly clear picture of who I am or more accurately who I’m not.

The space shuttle experience ended when I discovered that very few hardware engineering roles existed and I simply couldn’t compete. The MTS position helped me to think about ideas that were far beyond MTS and I learned that my personality would really struggle to be confined by a regional corporation in Manitoba. Cisco Systems is when I hit the big leagues and discovered the limits of my emotional capacity and I burned out. This is when I started a quiet solo gig in our basement. I loved working on my own but the lack of structure and the pressure to deliver on all the roles in my company was too much. The non-stop 7 day a week nature of church eventually wore me out as well. The lessons continued to a point where I had to go on mental health leave in 2010 from an engineering leadership role at Bell Canada.

In every role it seems like I hit a limit of some sort in my own capability or in the role’s ability to meet my dreams. In 2018, I tried another first. I moved into a business development role at Cisco. Today this role allows me to set my own objectives within the context of a global and solid company. I can work from anywhere. I can manage to objectives rather than be subject to the daily crisis calls of a customer facing team. In so many ways I’m now in an ideal role for me.

Thoughts About Retirement 

Even in this ideal role, I realize that there is pressure that pushes me to my limits and my mental health takes a beating from time to time. There is one feeling that has continued since the day I entered the work force almost 30 years ago. It is the desire to be unfettered from an employer and from relentless financial obligations. 

As our kids get established in the work world they remind me that adulting is hard. At some point I may come to terms with that. It could be that this final desire for freedom is achieved in retirement. 

My personal vision of retirement is probably unrealistic. In reality the vision of work freedom is a mental health challenge that I will learn to dance with my whole life. It’s in these times of struggle that I push myself beyond the difficult feelings and remember the many awesome experiences my career has made possible as well. I must learn to dance with another emotion. Gratitude.