One of my favorite sayings, “if you want to make the gods laugh, make a plan.”
Ever since I was promoted in my sales position with Scott Paper from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon in 1973, my “plan” had been to ultimately live my life in that beautiful Northwest part of our country. But, at that time in my career, my primary goal was to move up in the company, and for that to occur I needed to take promotions that involved moving to ever larger territories and responsibilities.
Always with an eye on returning, I subsequently accepted transfers to Omaha, and from there, to Boston for my first management position. Later I was
offered the District Manager’s position in Chicago, but told Scott management that I really wanted to get back to the Northwest. To my delight, they transferred the manager in Seattle to the Chicago job and offered me Seattle! What joy!! My plan had worked out; I would now not accept any more moves and live in the green, green Emerald City. This was 1979.
Seattle
But life happened and changes were made to my plan. A divorce, the ex-wife taking our two young children back to Boston, my accepting an ill-fated move to North Carolina to be near them, returning to Seattle and leaving Scott Paper to start up a Management Recruiters franchise that I was not good at, selling that and accepting a job with a Scott competitor, Fort Howard, in Los Angeles and convincing them to move me back to Seattle all happened by 1985. Once again, back in the Northwest, finally, after many setbacks, my plan was working. Ha!
In 1990 I remarried. In the next year I received a call from Fort Howard management asking me to interview for one to their five Division Managers position, this one located in Dallas. I had little interest in the offer, and especially not moving from Seattle to Dallas. But I wanted to impress my new wife with the fact that her husband’s company thought enough of him to consider him for higher office. Her response surprised me; she said “when I was about 14 and growing up in Florida, I visited an uncle in Denver. One afternoon he took my cousins and me up to Boulder. I really liked it. Do you think they would consider moving the office from Dallas to Boulder (which was within the geographic area of the division)?”
As I was certain that Fort Howard would never consider the move with all the hassle involved, I devised a new plan that had a triple win for me; I would tell management that I would like to apply for the job, which would please them, I would ask that they move the office location to Boulder which would make my wife happy and the company would refuse the request, which is want I wanted all along!
Well, as a candidate for the Division Manager’s position, I flew to corporate headquarters in Green Bay, Wisconsin for interviews. I was met at the airport by our National Sales Manager, who was armed with a comparison of the cost of living in Dallas versus Seattle. The first thing I told him was that “I would only consider to position if they moved the office to Boulder, Colorado.” He was somewhat taken aback, but said we should go ahead with the planned interviews and they would consider my request. As I was not burdened with any expectations, I sailed through all my meetings with the company’s upper management that day and left for home expecting my plan would work as I had laid it out. Ha!
To my great disappointment, I got a call later that week to congratulate me on being selected as Fort Howard’s new Western Division Manager! Crap!
So, I no choice but to accepted the move. And, what made things worse, I had to work out of the Dallas office for six months before we could get the office moved.
Boulder, Colorado
I have now been in Boulder since 1991 and consider myself lucky to be here. In fact, I have told people that if I were to stick a pin in a world map of the one place I would most like to live, it would be right where my home is on 16th Street. But, it took me many years to feel that way. Particularly when I made business trips back to Seattle in the first few years and, while driving back to the airport to return to Colorado, I always felt I was leaving home, not returning to it.
It turned out life had other plans.
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