I turned down a job.

It was 2003. I had been working as a programmer in legacy language on an ancient AS/400 system for a year and a half. I had interviewed with another company, working in VB6 which wasn’t great but at least it had some growth. But the pay was only slightly above what I was already making, and I wasn’t keen on VB6 when the web was taking off. I thought I could do better. Fast forward to the bust of 2004, and I’m being laid off from that legacy programming job.

I spend a year applying to every development job I can find, but it’s difficult with a glut of programmers all looking for work. I finally take a tech support job just to get by as I continue looking for a dev job. Little did I know that dev job would never come. I bounced from a few different jobs after that, most being some form of tech support and usually ending in layoffs. I spent 16 years trying to get another dev job before I finally gave up and left IT work altogether. I had to eventually face the fact that my development career died in 2004, all because I turned down a job.

My friend and I decided to learn how to swing dance. We lived kinda far from each other so he chose a dance studio that was more or less in the middle. That dance studio is where I met my husband. We’ve been together 23 years. Still dancing too. :)

There was this dude who applied for art school. They rejected him, which basically led to WW2 later on.

Horse Armor.

I was talking with my high school girlfriend about future career ideas and she mentioned one that made me think, “Huh, I never thought about that.” So I decided to read about it at the school library during lunch one day.

I can directly tie my college degree, all the places I’ve lived, most of my friends, half the countries I’ve traveled to, and meeting my spouse all back to that one moment.