A Million Little Pieces Of My Mind

By May, the political situation at my job in Omaha had so seriously destabilized that I realized it was only a matter of time before I would have to find another job. I also realized that I had made a lot more money as a consultant, than I ever could as a salaried employee. (Yes, a salaried employee would also get insurance with the job, but I figured I could easily afford insurance with a consultant's salary—in those days, about $60 an hour—and still wind up ahead.)

Many consultant jobs only lasted a week, or two, or four. And they didn't require being there for the weekend. So, I figured, we could live anywhere if I could just drive to the job for the week, and then come home for the weekend. My research suggested that Florida, especially Tampa and Orlando and Jacksonville, had a lot of openings for consultants. But rentals in those cities would be quite expensive. And since my wife and I were from Florida and had family and friends in St. Augustine, I decided we could just rent a mobile home in the town of Elkton. At that time, Elkton was in the boonies, about a half hour's drive from my mom and grandmother's apartment, and only a little farther from Mary's mom. So, Elkton it was!

I managed to find a double-wide trailer that was in okay condition. Actually, it was more like a 1.5x wide trailer, since the front part was half screened-in porch. My main memory of the screen door was the time I stepped out to see a little snake wriggling through little holes in the screen.

I had actually gotten my first Florida contract already. It was for a company in Tampa, I've forgotten which. We only had the station wagon, so I had to leave Mary, the kids, and adequate groceries in Elkton for the week, returning on weekends. Tampa was about a 4.5 hour drive from Elkton, so we put a mattress, blankets and pillow in the back of the wagon and I slept in it, in the company parking lot, showering at the nearby causeway beach each morning early before work.

The work itself involved working on an IBM computer with punch cards. That was similar to the first computer work I'd had with the Environmental Protection Agency, so it wasn't very difficult work. Being alone in Tampa (without extra money) was boring. Decades before the Internet or smartphones, I had no TV to watch in the evenings. I could (and did) go to the beach for free. But the causeway was as far as I could go because I had to save gas money for my weekend home.

And then I got sick. Horribly sick.

I was so sick that I had to use a few precious dollars to check into a fleabag motel. In the afternoon I faced the fact that I wasn't getting better on my own, and I went to an Urgent Care place I'd noticed on the way to the causeway. After a few tests, the doctor said I "probably" had hepatitis (he didn't say which kind), and gave me a prescription to take. It took me a week to recover, which I had to do on my own because I had the family car and I wasn't well enough to drive 4.5 hours to get home to the family. Besides, the doctor had said it was easily transmissible and I didn't want Mary or the kids to catch what I had.

I expected my job to have cancelled my contract by now; but they didn't. As it happened, a majority of the employees there, including my boss, had also been sick with the same thing. So I went back to work for a total of about two months. Then I had a contract in Jacksonville, which was great because I could actually commute to that one.