These things always remind me of that dream where I'm up on stage naked, giving a speech, and everyone can see how big a dick I am.
Take that however you want to take it.
[gifv]https://i.imgur.com/4D7FHSy.gifv[/gifv]
Anyway, I'm turning 65 in a few months and I've been running places like this for most of my adult life. My wife joked last night that it seems I have to start a new one every 20 years or so and I realized there's a lot of truth to that statement. My family's business was always construction and, like most kids whose family had a business, I got put into it at an early age. It was okay I suppose, it certainly paid the bills when I needed money, but it wasn't really what I wanted to do with my life. Starting with a hitch in the Navy back during the Vietnam war, I started trying things other than construction. The Navy was fun. I was a Gunner's Mate, briefly held the rank of Petty Officer 3rd class (very briefly... like, "ink wasn't dry on the paperwork" briefly), and it gave me my second exposure to computers, which I found fascinating. (The first had been in high school on the school's IBM 360 mainframe.) After the Navy, I went back to construction while I tried out a few new things like paparazzi, coin-op amusements tech, EMT, EVOC instructor, pool hustler, and some other stuff I've forgotten. I got my First Class Radio and Radiotelephone Operator's License after completing a correspondence course in my spare time, then Commodore computers released the C-64 and I got sucked into computers big time. I went to college using the GI Bill, earning a bachelor of science degree in computer & information sciences and an associate's degree in electrical engineering theory from a different college. At the same time, I started writing and selling software, most of which got published by an international Commodore computer user's magazine called "Ahoy!". It wasn't long after that I became their BBS sysop (my first computer forum of sorts), telecommunications editor, wrote a few of the very early online computer games, became Ahoy's media and online representative using the name "Captain B" (my managing editor assigned it to me) and it was all downhill from there. After Ahoy I kept running some very underground BBSes (there's this great documentary about them that I'm in called The BBS Documentary (http://bbsdocumentary.com)) while pursuing day jobs driving ambulances, a night job as a part-time laborer at Madison Square Garden, and working in the coin-op trade as a freelance tech, and doing monthly lectures on telecommunications as a favor to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW 3 represent!). I may or may not have also bought a service station in Brooklyn with 9 pumps, 3 repair bays, and a dog named Bob Barker while getting my ASE certification somewhere in there. I sold the station not long after I bought it (it needed a $2.5M update with new tanks and pumps), managed it through the rebuild, and went back to construction while I planned my next move. May 21st, 1999, that all came to a screeching, smoking halt when I came home from work to find I didn't have one anymore because a broken gas line in our bedroom ceiling had burned the place down, and watched as my wife and kids got into her boyfriend's car and drove away.
Yeah, that kinda stung a bit. If my shotgun hadn't gone up in the blaze I probably wouldn't be typing this. I spent the better part of the next 18 months homeless, living on the streets in NYC with occasional stays at the houses of friends and one of my adopted sisters. Spring of 2001 found me in a rented hotel room in Allentown, PA, and starting work as an operator for Bell Atlantic, soon to become Verizon. I stayed at Verizon until they did something dumb and wanted me to be dumb with them. I quit and got a job a couple of days later managing stores in a chain of pet supply stores. In the evenings I bought myself a computer and started an online forum and founded an international association for the game Steel Panthers: World at War called The Depot (that I ran for 13 years before handing it over to someone else to run). During this time I met and started dating a lady from Baltimore, MD. When she developed breast cancer and started chemo and radiation I started commuting to care for her. Almost daily I'd turn my store over to my evening cashier at 5 PM and hop a bus to Philidelphia, then another to Baltimore, getting there around 11 PM. I'd cook for her, do laundry, clean the house and just keep her company until 4 AM when I'd hop two more buses back to Allentown to open my store by 9 AM. When she was scheduled for a mastectomy I quit my job and moved in with her in Baltimore to care for her. After her recovery, we came to the realization that we were not meant to live together and I moved into a rooming house and started a handyman business, eventually taking over the name of the family business after my dad passed away and none of the other kids wanted it. (Sue, the lady in Baltimore, succumbed to breast cancer in 2005 and I still miss her dearly.)
I started dating my current wife in '04 and joined ZS within a year of their beginning. As the years went by and my wife and I bought a house together and got married (there were a couple of moves in there from Baltimore to DC to here in Virginia) I got more into prepping, especially after a construction site accident left me partially disabled. My disability finally caused me to retire from construction and boredom lead me to become a Skywarn Spotter for the National Weather Service and amateur radio operator. As a ham, I got very involved in the local club, won a few awards, and participated in about a hundred different public service events from the Marine Corps Historic Half Marathon, to bicycle races, and international triathlons as a volunteer radio operator. I also got very involved in disaster preparedness, volunteering with my local city and county Fire & Rescue departments, the county sheriff's department, the county and state Emergency Management departments, and FEMA. I gave most of that up when nerve damage from a really horrible case of shingles (I was away from home and could not get treatment of any kind for 4 days) left me permanently and fully disabled. That left me too much time on my hands so I became a ZS mod, then admin, and now here.
tl;dr: I did a bunch of stuff and then built this place
(https://i.imgur.com/4Ba6JOC.jpg)
Wow..... all I can say is wow. Oh and thanks. You've had a hell of a life, let's hope you're here for at least another 20 years. And can pass this site off and start another!
If there was an legend award you could give yourself in the forum, I vote you get it.
Quote from: Halfapint on June 07, 2021, 10:56:18 PM
Wow..... all I can say is wow. Oh and thanks. You've had a hell of a life, let's hope you're here for at least another 20 years. And can pass this site off and start another!
If there was an legend award you could give yourself in the forum, I vote you get it.
Nah, no legend here, just a guy dealing with life as it comes. Sometimes I managed to do a good job of it, sometimes I fucked up royally (ask why my kids and family don't talk to me anymore), but it is what it is and I own all of it. BTW, no male in my family has ever lived past the age of 72, so if I'm still around when I'm 85 you might want to zed check me... just in case. The best I can hope for is that when it's all said and done the positives I've done will have outweighed the negatives... and that the PPV rights to the battle of my relatives over my estate make my wife a very rich lady.
Quote from: NT2C on June 07, 2021, 11:08:26 PM
Nah, no legend here, just a guy dealing with life as it comes. Sometimes I managed to do a good job of it, sometimes I fucked up royally (ask why my kids and family don't talk to me anymore), but it is what it is and I own all of it. BTW, no male in my family has ever lived past the age of 72, so if I'm still around when I'm 85 you might want to zed check me... just in case. The best I can hope for is that when it's all said and done the positives I've done will have outweighed the negatives... and that the PPV rights to the battle of my relatives over my estate make my wife a very rich lady.
Well starting up a new home for us ZS refugees ought to get you a few bonus points when the tally finally comes due! Thank you very much for this!
Let us know when you need coffee delivered. I'm sure we can find someone that delivers coffee in your corner of the world.
Quote from: RoneKiln on June 09, 2021, 10:48:05 PM
Let us know when you need coffee delivered. I'm sure we can find someone that delivers coffee in your corner of the world.
No worries:
(https://ufozs.com/smf/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2Fz2by0QD.jpg&hash=9ecade1e4e7d71aa5641f8c49de33e3dbeea7c11) (https://imgur.com/z2by0QD)
Always a pot at the ready.
Thanks NT2C for getting us set up an running. And especially thank you for your service.
The owner of the company I work for has a coffee roasting business- PM me your addy, I'll get some headed your way. Would you like whole bean or ground?
Quote from: NapalmMan67 on June 14, 2021, 04:35:59 PM
Thanks NT2C for getting us set up an running. And especially thank you for your service.
The owner of the company I work for has a coffee roasting business- PM me your addy, I'll get some headed your way. Would you like whole bean or ground?
Been (or should that be "bean"?) meaning to buy a grinder but I'm lazy and would just raid the jar of instant I keep in my tertiary preps. :coffee3:
Let me lend my voice to the chorus thanking you N2TC for your service to country and community, for the wealth of life experience you freely share and especially for continuing to provide a platform for a bunch of cantankerous, diverse, opinionated people to gather, share ideas, knowledge, humor and - every once in a while - wisdom.
My deepest thanks to you for getting this off the ground and all the work that must have gone into this. You are a good man.
Quote from: woodsghost on June 14, 2021, 08:33:14 PM
My deepest thanks to you for getting this off the ground and all the work that must have gone into this. You are a good man.
Well... A very useful man at least. :clownshoes:
Y'all are embarrassing me now. :smiley_schamen:
Truth be told, I like this community and want to see it continue and not just be snuffed out by ZS, and I happen to have expertise in the building and running of forums, so I stepped up. One of the founding tenants of ZS was/is service to your community and this is my virtual community in addition to the one I have in meatworld. Any one of you that happened to have the same kind of skills and resources would have done the same.
We may be on a different forum now but, "We're ZS, we got this" still applies.
Quote from: RoneKiln on June 14, 2021, 11:26:25 PM
Well... A very useful man at least. :clownshoes:
Been talking to my wife? :))