Dear Family;

I'll start off with a little story of how we met. I hired her into the Internet group at Saturn as a web developer back in 1994 as a contract employee. She quickly excelled at her work and when we were faced with a corporate initiative of getting rid of all the contractors, I was able to hire her into EDS. She worked for me through the separation and divorce with Connie. Other than normal employee/boss interactions - work assignments, status meetings, customer updates, we didn't talk much. I was going through a pretty hard time at home and I left my personal life at home when I went to work. I didn't want to talk to anybody about what was going on at home especially employees, who ought to respect their boss. That's how I felt anyhow.

Well, I was invited to a Floating Men Concert at a local club and low and behold Christine was there. We spent most of the night talking while the band played. I found out that The Floating Men were just one of many, many things we had in common. It was uncanny, we liked the same food, music, had the same stop and smell the roses outlook on life. We were in tune with each other somehow with our thoughts and feelings. I don't know how to explain it other than to say that nothing happens in God's world by mistake. I was at a point in my career at EDS where the business had grown substantially, and once again it was corporate objective time. Managers had to have about 20 + people reporting to them in an attempt to flatten the organization. The majority of the web team didn't report to me in the computer. They were either located under a figurehead manager in Michigan or they were in the development program and showed up under a different manager in TN. It looked like I only had 3 people on the team even though I was leading 10 or so. My boss couldn't explain that very well so he assigned me another team of about 20 PC programmers. Their previous manager was not very people oriented and I started in the hole. Very quickly the new team took up all of my time. I don't mind the administrative stuff as long as I get a chance to do some fun things also. So to make a long story longer, I chose to go back to being an individual performer. The benefits of this were threefold, I could see some benefit from my work and feel good about my job again, I didn't feel like a baby-sitter, and I could see Christy on a personal level. A win all the way around!!!!

I left managing on the Saturn Account to being a system administrator for Horace Small, a small clothing manufacturer in Nashville. I did sys admin work implementing SAP for their corporation. This gave me an excellent skill-set with an Internet background and a new Enterprise Solutions skill-set Due to Corporate organizational changes, I had an opportunity in the spring to join the E-Solutions team - I took a position as Senior Technical Consultant. These days I work from home, going on "engagements" with the customer, about 1 a month. I have been very fortunate to work with some amazing customers, and be able to do things I really enjoy.

That's all for now

Love Chuck