O O Ø O O O O
Autobiographical Segment
We join this life, already in progress.
My life began with the usual Lego combination packs: the white boxes with the thick green base plates. Not the thick, clumsy Duplo for preschoolers, but the correct, basic bricks in red, blue and yellow.
I was reared in the satellite town of Okotoks, Alberta. From the age of three until the time I left for university, I watched the town's support services morph from the remains of a farming town with its own self sustaining industry, to that of a pure Calgary feeder community. Today, Okotoks has one of every fast food franchise, so the locals are happy.
To ensure the last half of grade school was a challenging, tearful affair, my parents enrolled me in French immersion and International Baccalaureate schools in the city. I began six years of daily commutes to school, and struggled through learning a language the hard way: immersed in class, but nowhere else. I learned that math is more or less the same in French, but social studies are an entirely different affair.
After high school I inevitably enrolled at the University of Calgary to pursue my long interest in advertising. There I learned that in order to qualify for a B.Comm, you have some tough sledding through some very dry subject matter. Fortunately, I managed to squeeze a sufficient number of humanities options between my numerous accounting courses. Eventually I came to the realization that I was less interested in advertising than the layout and design of the ads themselves. Regardless, I finished what I set out to accomplish.
By the time I graduated with my marketing degree, the advertising industry in Calgary was in the midst of a serious contraction, and a job in that field seemed unlikely. Like any job-seeking twentysomething in the Nineties, I found myself doing computer support for a local outsourcing company.
Less than two years later I read Coupland's Microserfs, met the perfect girl, caught *wanderlust*, and quit my steady job.
I freelanced for a while, diving into development and design for the nascent World Wide Web. This was the first time I had ever had the chance to get paid for creative thought. I worked at home, feverishly at times, and produced smart, enjoyable web creations. And of course the clients recognized this, most of the time.
When we had enough web design money saved, my girlfriend and I converted it to forints, koruna, zloty, and marks, and slowly spent it in seemingly every small town in central Europe. Our purpose was to see the cities and drink the beer before the rest of the backpack crowd could make English the dominant language in the market squares. For me, it might also have had something to do with Sterling's Triumph of the Plastic People, from the January 1995 issue of Wired.
We heard plenty of English spoken in parts of Prague, but not a word outside the Andy Warhol museum in Medzilaborce, Slovakia.
Returning only moments before dysfunctional homesickness set in, I picked up my information services consulting career, as those were the skills in highest demand. I banded together with several close friends and coworkers, and founded Codetalker Communications, a network security consulting firm. My involvement with Codetalker has certainly helped define the last four years of my life. Specifically, it has defined all the evenings and weekends I've worked.
As a shareholder and director, I had the sometimes unenviable challenge of managing and collecting the accounts, and settling Codetalker's regulatory and legal affairs, while continuing to consult full time for various clients.
We did very well for a couple of years, considering our stubborn pride prevented us from taking any money from outside investors. We financed everything from cash flow, and suffered accordingly. Eventually, for reasons that vary from funny to sometimes sad, we agreed to stop selling bitter medicine to unwilling executives, and stuck a fork in the entire company.
I bounced around for a while, and accidentally wound up in the middle of Alberta's electric market deregulation deathmarch. It was quite unpleasant, but we eventually met with some semblance of what we'll call success. Take a look at Alberta in ten years, and you'll see what I mean.
And then once again I found my way out. Now I'm back where every young, disenchanted, Canadian semi-professional is: back in school, baby.
Evan Spence