Faco. This is the only person whose name I will mention within this whole chronicle of my work history. Faco. I’m not even going to mention his full name. It’s not required. “Faco” was his stage name. Sort of like “Prince”, or “Madonna” or a hurricane. No need to mention his last name. Everyone in our building knew him. He had a major in Industrial Engineering. However, he had no challenges when it came to join the team and behave like a full-fledged telecommunications engineer. His first role (of many in the team) was as a topographic transmission planner/surveyor. It took him no time to learn those skills. He was in charge of going to the far edges of the then fast growing mobile network in order to give the green light to continue the expansion. I saw him in action. He was excellent. He could grab his binoculars, climb a tower and shout out loud from the top: “there. We are going to link this new site right there”. I would turn around and face in the direction he was pointing at but could see nothing but the horizon. I had nothing else to say but “alright, man. If you say so…”

 

But being a great surveyor, master of the topographic studies, is not why anybody would recall him. Faco was very easygoing and friendly. A natural born comedian, with a sarcastic grin painted on his face most of the time. He once called me at 2:30 am to ask me if I knew the lyrics of the Elton John song from the movie “The Lion King”, only to abruptly hang up shortly after I said “well..um…yeah, I guess”. Or sometimes he would just call you randomly and ask you “Do you like black beans?”, and then would immediately hang up. Pretty much he was the ultimate prankster in the team. It is not hard to remember his laughter while mocking at any of us, as you would hear it so often in the office that you couldn’t help but laugh along.

 

Also, the guy absolutely impressed me with how quickly he would learn something new, sometimes related to his job but mostly things completely unrelated to his profession. She showed up one day and said: “I think I want to buy a motocross bike”. He, then, bought it and started riding it every weekend. Granted, he broke one leg after a few weeks, but that didn’t deter him. He mastered that skill. And I really thought he had lost it when he said “I am going to build a house”. That was not the typical way to say I will pay someone to design it and build it for me then I will move in. Nope. Not the case here: he actually designed his country house. And he built it. When most of the twenty something kids are nowadays (and were then) longing for Friday to arrive so they could get completely wasted, Faco’s objective was to hit the road on Friday evenings, driving for more than 3 hours, to get to the construction site.

 

His next challenge:  become a pilot. I think that he got bitten by the bug while playing “Flight Simulator” on the computer.  I don’t know. He started taking his lessons over several months and was really close from getting his license. He only needed to complete the mandatory amount of flight hours and that was it. The then industrial engineer/telecom surveyor/motocross daredevil/architect/civil engineer was about to add a new notch to his accomplishments belt: private pilot.

Back then, in 2006, Faco and I had a similar arrangement to the one I once had with my boss at my first job: he would split some of his overtime work hours and vacation days into “out of office hours”, so he could go and add some flight time whenever it was convenient to him. One day he told me: “tomorrow I will be off the whole day. I will be flying”, so I agreed.  The very next day, in the early afternoon, one of our teammates approaches me with a somber face and says “We have a problem. The control tower lost contact with Faco’s plane for over an hour”. I heard that phrase and I didn’t think that anything wrong was happening. I asked him: “have they tried his cell?” Then I instantly grabbed my phone and dialed him up. No answer. And just then was when it sank in: the control tower had lost contact with the plane…for over an hour. Why was I calling a cell phone to try to reach him? That is the first reaction: denial. “Come on. It’s Faco”, I said. “He must be pulling our legs here. It must be one of his pranks”.

 

It wasn’t. A few hours after that a convoy had been arranged, with the local authorities and people from our team, to search the suspected crash area. It was a remote region, between mountains, with no road access. Everybody did the best they could, but the cold weather and darkness of the night were making the search effort difficult. The remaining of the plane was found the day after. 3 other people were on the plane. No survivor. The irony of it all: Faco wasn’t the pilot at the time of the crash. He was on the plane only accumulating flight hours.

 

I could expand on how sad it was the whole experience at a personal level. How everybody was in suspense, waiting to hear positive news, only to see all hope on everybody’s increasing gloomy faces fading away as hours were passing by. I could describe how difficult it was for some of us to try to ease the pain and comfort his family, especially his mom. I could describe how a vast amount of people manifested their presence in that difficult time, friends, colleagues, vendors, family, etc. How we all went to say the final goodbye to him at the very same place where he built his house, etc. There won’t be enough space here to write that part of the story. For now, I will try to keep this whole episode centered on how work was affected by this tragedy.

 

Just like that, one of us was gone. Faco’s was never going to sit down by his desk again. The vibe in the office changed. We realized how fragile life is. How life doesn’t care if you are 99 or 27: when it’s your time it’s your time. And, as cruel as that sounds, that desk had to be occupied by somebody else. Life lesson #11: especially in the corporate environment: “Show must go on”. 1 month after the tragic accident, we started the interviews. Hiring somebody to replace Faco was not an easy task. Both professionally and at a personal level, whoever was hired to replace him had some big shoes to fill. Who were we going to hire that would fit in the team? I must admit that I was discouraged, and I started looking for a “clone” of Faco, and not just a suitable engineer at the professional level. That was my bad. The next guy wasn’t the one to blame for something he had no control of. I ended up going the down the easy road and hired an internal resource. I thought it was going to be the easiest transition for the entire team. It worked, yet you could see that jokes between us in the team were less frequent. There was a different mood.

 

After a while, work life went back to normal. No major events until 3 months before I left Orange. I would say that the 6 years and 5 months that I stayed at Orange were the backbone of my career and my personal life, where I made a lot of friends and stayed until July 2007. I honestly wouldn’t be where I am now had I not had all the opportunities and knowledge I gathered there in the telecommunications world.  Then why did I leave? Good question. Let’s see:

 

Chapter 4 . The Red Era. Still counting!

 

Did I mention earlier that it was hard to quit a job where they treat you well? Please scratch that. Doing that in 2001 took me barely a couple of days to decide and a 30 mins chat with my then boss. Yes. It was hard. But do you want to know what is REALLY hard? To this date, there hasn’t been a single more stressful moment in my life than the 6 months surrounding my decision in 2007 to, not only quit my job at Orange, but move to another country.

 

To be continued…

Chapter 3 . The Orange years (part 1)

 

How do you know when you are ready to jump ship in your professional life (or in your love life, because it applies there as well)? It’s not when the counter offer isn’t good enough. It’s when you don’t even want to HEAR the counter offer! This is what happened to me in January 2001. This part of the story starts a few months before that, though.

France Telecom, a big telco operator in France, decided to invest in a mobile phone network in Dom Rep. I believe that they sent the first technical team to survey the country in 1999. Some of my classmates, from an earlier promotion, had already finished college and started working for them around mid 2000, a few months before FT launched the service in DR under the name Orange. I was still going through my final year at college so I didn’t want to apply and change jobs while still juggling with the work load in college.  So I decided to wait before even considering leaving my job. In any case, why would I want to apply to work at France Telecom when everybody’s goal in my class was to work for Verizon Dominicana??? (Ah, the naïveté of the young mind…).

By the time I was reaching my last month in college, on a random Friday night, I asked my girlfriend at the time if she wanted to go out for dinner. Back in 2000, dining out to me was synonym of “hey, let’s go to Burger King”. As I was seriously trying to “make it rain” that night I completely swept my girlfriend off her feet and decided to take her somewhere else on that lovely night: I checked my wallet and we ended up at a very stylish gas station convenience store, where we each had, not one, but TWO hotdogs with melted cheese on them. Fancy, I know…

Anyway, that’s when and where I ran into one of my ex classmates from college. We might have taken 3 or 4 classes together. Not more than that. He had finished college the year before me. I think that he was filling up his tank and entered the convenience store to buy a bottle of water (it could have been a cold Presidente… can’t remember). He saw me, recognized me, barely remembered my name, and we started a short chat. The usual: “what are you doing?”, “how’s life after college?”, and then he says that he was working for France Telecom. I was 2 weeks shy from finishing college myself, so I asked “are they hiring?” He says: “not sure, but send me your CV to xxxxxxx@orange.com.do”. We said goodbye and the night continued to me as usual.

 

Life lesson #6: you’ve got to be lucky to be at the right place at the right time. You have read about why I was there. But why did HE end up at that specific gas station at that moment? Where was he coming from? Where was he going? Did he go into the convenience store because he was thirsty? Was it because somebody else asked him for a drink? Why did we decide to go a bit beyond the usual polite interaction of the acknowledgement of the acquaintances:  “How are you?” “Cool!”, “Good to see you”, “You too”, “Bye”? Still to this day I consider that random encounter at the gas station as a defining moment in my life. And there is nothing I could have done about it. I couldn’t have planned it. I couldn’t have prevented it. It is the randomness of life that makes life itself interesting.

 

Life lesson #7: be good to everyone. If you can’t be good to everybody, at least don’t be an asshole. I think about how different my life would be right now had I been such a jackass to that fella while we were in college that he had decided to give me a fake e-mail address that night. Or had he decided to see my e-mail and then send it directly to his recycle bin. I later got to know him better and I know that he did what any other decent human being would do. He wasn’t behaving like a super hero. He didn’t go to sleep that night thinking “I’m an awesome human being!”. Maybe it cost him no time or effort to forward my CV to his boss. Maybe it did. I don’t know. However, he doesn’t realize how that moment changed dramatically the rest of MY life. I will forever be grateful to him for behaving like a decent human being; for not behaving like an asshole…

 

The following week I sent him my CV. I was called for an interview the day after. I received an offer to work for a booming, young, rising company, in the same industry that I wanted to work in. And salary and marginal benefits represented more than twice what I was making at the time. The opportunity to grow was huge. THAT’s how you know that you are ready to jump ship. I left that meeting without a single doubt in my mind of what I was going to do. I HAD to join them. That determination, though, didn’t make it easy to resign my job that day.

 

Life lesson #8: Quitting a job is not easy if you are being treated right. But if you have to do it, you have to do it. It is a very stressing moment. When I walked in my boss’s office on January 30^th 2001, it was like a scene of a thriller movie. I asked if I could talk to him. He looked deeply into my eyes, paused for what it seemed to me like an eternity, and said: “Sure. Tell me”. I started talking and I had nothing but a shaky voice coming out of my mouth. He asked me to sit down. I continued talking, and within seconds my body was feeling more confident and relaxed. I thanked him for bringing me into his business and for all the opportunity the company had given me throughout the years. He asked me right away if I wanted a salary increase, asked me to give him a couple of days to present a counter offer. I was honest. I told him “you cannot match the offer I received. And even if you do, that is where I want to continue my professional life starting now. It is the best opportunity to grow that I have been presented with. It is what I studied for”. He understood. Said he was proud of me and that the entire team will miss its youngest member when I leave. *Cue the tears*. It was as if somebody had started playing a violin in the background. He asked me until when could I stay, so I ended up staying until the very last possible day. 2 weeks later the technical team was ready to move ahead without me, customers understood my position and the whole transition was nothing but a sweet one. Then I was ready join Orange.

On February 19^th 2001, my first day at Orange, I showed up wearing dress pants and a long sleeve dress shirt. The sharpest I had looked in a long while. The department director said: “welcome, it is time for you to meet your boss now”, I looked behind me and there was this tall slim guy, wearing boots, short cargo pants, a sleeve-less black T-shirt of some heavy metal band, tattoos on both arms, piercings on bottom lip, eyebrows and ears. I kept looking for my boss… nobody else came walking behind him… that was it! This dude was not impressed by my reaction when I first met him. I was shocked that he was allowed to go to work like that, to say the least. Life lesson #9: appearance is not that important if you work in the tech team of a telecommunications company. This “boss”, from Slovakia, became one of my friends. Shared same taste in music and to this date we still chat every now and then. He is a very smart guy, very hard working engineer, with an incredible work routine. On my very first day at work I was just punched in the face by the multi-cultural environment. Nobody was wearing suits, ties, etc. Everybody was sporting t-shirts and jeans. Among them, I looked like a Jehovah’s Witness, ready to preach the word of the Lord. Anyway, back to my boss: obviously one of us was not dressed accordingly to what was about to happen…

 

10 minutes later I was on the rooftop of the building, wearing a safety harness on my body, long sleeve shirt on the floor. I was under the sun and sweating, learning from my new boss how to safely climb an antenna pole. That one was easy. We were only 16 meters away from the ground. The next day: on the rooftop of an 11 story high building, hanging from a pole at about 45 meters away from the ground. Life lesson #10: no matter how high you are, if you have good skills and safety system you will not fall. Climbing towers became my bread and butter for a year. I drove around Dom Rep and visited places that I had never seen before.

 

It was also while working there when I traveled outside of Dominican Republic for the first time in my life. I went to Milan, Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Miami, etc. I’d never had the opportunity, before Orange Dominicana, to visit those places. For some people this might be trivial, but please allow me to say it again: I was 23 years old and I had NEVER left Dom Rep before joining this company, yet within 40 days of being part of starting my contract there I was already on a plane crossing the Atlantic. I would be lying if I said that it was an unimportant event in my life: I didn’t sleep for a single second. I was on a red-eye flight, a 9 hours flight, and I didn’t sleep at all. I was too excited. Only a few weeks earlier I was eating a hotdog at a gas station in Santo Domingo, but there I was: having a meal with my colleagues at a chic restaurant in Milan; watching people riding their bikes while wearing their Armani suits to the office; watching how everybody walking down the road looked like coming out of a movie set; learning how to curse in Italian by shouting out loud in a crowded bar. To me those were really eye opening experiences. I tried my best to look and behave cool about it, but everyone could tell that I was enjoying the opportunity. Say what you want, man, but to me that was cool!

 

It was also my introduction to 24/7 work: I had to be reachable on my cell phone around the clock. Maybe that’s how my current insomnia started! It was a bittersweet experience. Here you are, learning tons of stuff, making a decent amount of money, driving around the country, meeting new places, etc. On the other hand, there were days when it was insufferable: you had to cut short your trip to the beach with friends because “site 327 is down and we don’t know what’s wrong”. Or “node RRA-1 is blinking red on the remote management system. Yes, I know it is 3:07 am, but please leave your bed and come ASAP, even if it will take you 30 mins. Thanks for coming. Oh, sorry! It was not red. It is actually pink. What? Pink means nothing? Oh, my bad. Sorry, man! I didn’t know. I thought I saw it red”. Happy times!

 

I learnt a lot that first year from everybody around the office. The best part of it all was that Orange was sort of an extension of the university campus: most of the engineers were former classmates. Imagine yourself in your twenties, working in the same office with another 50 to 60 twenty year old people, most of them coming from the same college you attended, and the number kept growing every week. Hilarity ensued! And most of the “real bosses” were equally as cool, still in their late twenties / early thirties, most of them coming to Dom Rep on short terms assignments and ended up staying for years. It is safe to say that within a couple of months we were all buddies: drinking buddies, going to the beach buddies, Europe trip buddies, going to the mountains buddies, birthday party buddies, etc. Truthfully, I am surprised on how professional we were when it came to actually completing a job. It was a multicultural and tolerant environment, where both stress and hilarity were mixed to perfection.

This easygoing environment and comradery, after a while, made it somehow difficult after a year when my role in the company changed. Promotions came quickly within the company, which is a typical situation you can see in any young business with the profile of France Telecom/Orange Dominicana. More responsibility, greater visibility, more stress. I decided to start my MBA in late 2001. Around that same time I received a promotion and became a manager of a department different from the one I was part of at the time. I must admit that I was not ready for that. I liked to be organized and I had a very structured way to deal with problems, and get things done as quickly and efficiently as possible… for myself. But that didn’t mean that I was ready to manage people or that particular team. I went from being their “pal” to being their “boss”. It is not easy the first time.

 

I had to learn as quickly as I could. I learnt the hard way how difficult it is to start managing a team that has been formed before you joined it. If you are not aware of how difficult this could be for a “newbie”, please read The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli, and you will understand why it was uphill for me. It took me months to be able to make things work among ourselves; to be able to trust each other. But it ended up being a great experience. It is now part of the toolkit that I use every now and then when dealing with stakeholders at work.

I would say that it took us about 6 months into that new role for us to be OK again, and after that the entire team was “working together” without many issues. And we went back to behave as friends as opposed to just colleagues. And we watched together how the company evolved. How the teams were changing. How the whole organization was changing. New leadership were arriving; people leaving the country to advance in their studies; the never ending farewell parties; more promotions, etc. Overall it was a rather nice work environment.

And then there is the other side of the coin: when you are working really hard for years, shoulder to shoulder, with your team mates, your friends, totally unaware of the importance of life, and suddenly death makes its ever unforeseen appearance…

To be continued…

Chapter 2 . The college years

 

If you want to know how it felt when I started college, imagine what you were doing when you were 14 years old. Picture yourself doing the normal stuff that a teenager does. Now picture yourself at that same age (14 years old) going into a playground at any random McDonald’s restaurant and start playing with the toddlers. That’s how I felt. It was very surreal. Not only was I two years older than almost everybody in my class, but already had two years of work experience in my back. At that particular age in our life, it pretty much seemed like my classmates and I were, at least, 5 light years apart:

• I had a very tight schedule, as this particular college compresses a vast amount of knowledge in terms of only 12 weeks; all my time had to be accounted for. Most of my colleagues were happy about the fact that they were on the night stream, like “grown-ups”, and could sleep late the day after; they could go to a bar or to a party right after class.
• I had to study in between classes to make up for the fact that I could not study during the day while at work. Some of my classmates were playing poker before, in between and after classes.
• My main concern was to try to not be exhausted while at work. Their main concern was either to work out at the gym in the afternoons or watch the latest “Dragon Ball Z” episode.
• I couldn’t fail any class because that would mean I would have to pay for that same class again and it would extend my time in college. They couldn’t fail a class because their parents would be disappointed (or would kill them!).

Don’t get me wrong: If those words sound bitter, please let me assure you that it is neither how I feel now nor how I felt back then. I am not saying that I was better than them. Had I been in their shoes I would have done exactly the same things they were doing. I’m just stating now that there was a clear difference between us. A clear difference in the way we approached life at that stage in our lives; a clear difference between us in terms of priorities.

 

Also, some of the “youngsters” in my class were really smart. They were fresh out of high school, with an impressive knowledge toolkit; they were able to resolve trigonometric integrals very easily. On the other hand, I didn’t even know what an integral was! I had never seen that elongated “S” in my life! That is the type of knowledge that you are not exposed to when you attend a technical school, so I needed to get my act together if I wanted to catch up with “the youth”.

 

I had to juggle with both work and that type of academic pressure. It wasn’t all horrible, though. I made some long lasting friendships at college and I can safely say that they are still great friends of mine and that we will be friends forever. And, with time, either I started to think like them, they started to think like me, or a combination of both. Or maybe it’s just because it took some time until I started hanging out with my core group of colleagues, my buddies (“Los Muyayos”), the ones that spent the final two years of the program with me. We didn’t realize of this back then, but we were quite a smart little gang: 5 out of 7 of us graduated with honors. Not too shabby, huh? (However, please remember my life lesson #1…)

 

The reality is that, at the beginning of the first year of the program, my classmates then and I were not in sync. It was really funny when some of my earlier colleagues called me “grandpa” when I refused to skip class to go with them to the movies to watch “Men in Black I”. I don’t know, but something tells me that neither Tommy “Two-Face” Lee Jones nor Mister Fresh Prince were going to pay for my additional college fees had I failed that class. I ended up watching that movie over that weekend, anyway. No class skip required! I had to play by the rules when it came to college…. Once again: priorities…

 

Obviously working full time and being at a very demanding and time consuming university took its toll on me. If I wanted to finish the program in time I had to take classes during regular business hours: not all classes were available between 6 pm and 10 pm. Some were only available in the afternoon stream and some of them only in the morning one. I decided to use my work holidays (14 days a year) to dedicate them to my education: I would split all 14 vacation days into hours, so I sent a plan to my boss and I was able to get away with taking a few classes at 4:00 pm, 2 days a week, for a few months every year, in a way that I wasn’t staying behind.  I even took one that was at a dreadful time for any one on a 8-5 job: from 11:00 am until 1:00 pm. This brings me to life lesson #5: stay away from rigid schedule employments.

 

I know. This is easier said than done. You don’t know how flexible your job will be until you are actually working there. But even if you cannot find out what is it like before joining the organization, once you are in there you need to start testing the flexibility of your current employment. Start bending some rules little by little, without breaking them. Some rules are there just because “things have always been done like this”, but not because they add any value to the business. Just make sure that you are not affecting the business (I said “bend”, not “break” the rules). Test the water before jumping in.

 

And you need to set your priorities straight: by 1997 I knew that my first job was not going to be THE job after I graduated from college. I knew I wanted more. I would give the best of me during working hours, but finishing college was my main goal. Having said that, I could not have finished college in 3.5 years had it not been because my boss at the time understood my situation and allowed me to leave early a couple of days a week in exchange for my vacation time. To me it was a win-win situation, as I was still showing up in office every day, as opposed to having me out 14 days in a row once a year.

 

This lesson has been particularly important to me. Humans are not robots. Life happens. You will get sick, you will need to go to get your car fixed, you will have to visit a relative at the hospital, you will want go to watch your kid’s school play, etc. So make sure you stay away from an employment that demands you to be there during a fixed period of time every single day of your life. I believe that this is not good for the employee or for the employer. It is not sustainable. Technology makes it easier nowadays by avoiding being physically present “at work”, with email access on your mobile phone, Internet access everywhere you go, etc. But back in the late 90’s it was not the case. I only bought my first cell phone in 2000, so it wasn’t as easy back then.

 

I believe that my employers were really kind to me and they allowed me to be where I am now. I will always be grateful to them. And I will always remember a phrase my first boss once told me: “Don’t get fooled by society: you can prosper in life by doing the right thing”. This is not even a life lesson. This is a life motto, which you need to have tattooed on the back of your eyelids. I stayed with them, my first job, for 5 years and 6 months. I stayed until I was ready to move to the next chapter in my life.

 

Chapter 3 . The Orange years

 

How do you know when you are ready to jump ship in your professional life (or in your love life, because it applies there as well)?

To be continued….

 

On Friday September 1^st 1995 I started working at my first full time job and I haven’t been jobless since. I have worked at 3 different companies throughout these 20 years and there has never been a single day of rest in between them:I have never been unemployed since September 1995. Is that the definition of success? Not necessarily, really. What is interesting is to know the details. The whole story. Starting with what happened beforehand. My life was very different 20 years ago….

Chapter 1 . The initial struggle

I had already finished my studies at a technical oriented high school in late May 1995, with awesome grades. That fact made me believe that I was the king of the world! I was so wrong: I was unable to find a job for 3 months. By August, all of my 20 class mates who wanted a job had already started working. Yet I was still at home, desperately hoping for an opportunity to start getting some very well needed additional income at my parents’ household. When it comes to my professional life, that situation was my first real life lesson: good grades, even when they could mean that you are at least smart enough to deal with multiple tasks, they don’t mean a thing when it comes to get you a job. Don’t fool yourself: you will still need more than good grades.

I believe that I was the only one in my class who didn’t have to take general/complimentary exams in June 1995, which I thought was a clear advantage that I had to easily get one of the available spots at electronics and computer oriented companies. I was sadly mistaken: I saw the days go by and very quickly June had ended and my job search that month was fruitless. July had also ended and August was going down the same road. Please remember that back then there was no Linked In, no Facebook, no Whatsapp. My family didn’t have any acquaintance that could get me at least into one job interview. My close circle of friend was the same one on the hunt for jobs or had just landed in positions where they had no leverage to include me in their organization.

If I wanted to apply for a job I needed to physically go out on the road and search for the opportunity. I dropped my CV at every single business I could afford to go to. And printing my own CV wasn’t as inexpensive to me back then as it sounds to any of us right now. Even public transportation fees were challenging to me at the time. Logistics were not easy. And nobody was knocking at my door to offer me a job.

Therefore, when I landed that interview that led me to my first job I accepted the first offer they put in front of me: my first salary was only 40% of what some of my colleagues were making already. I was 17 years old at the time. At that age most kids are already getting ready to go to college and continue their education. That was not my case. I had a high school student loan to pay before getting the certificate which would allow me to apply for any university. I needed a salary. Life lesson #2: if you are in need you take what you are being given. Then work your way up from there. 

I was happy. I had one foot in the system, finally. I worked for a company who specialized in electronic article surveillance, closed circuit TV (CCTV) and electronic access control systems. It was a small company (less than 15 employees). It was interesting not only learning how the electronic systems work (boring part, for most people) but how humans interact with each other in a work environment: this is not something you learn in the classroom. You meet all different types of people. You are not surrounding by your peers anymore. Some of you co-workers are 15 or 20 year older than you are, with very different lifestyles and burdens than yours. You really start learning when you listen and watch carefully how people interact. And, man, did I interact with the customers! Those first years of my professional life gave me a face to face know-how of what being a customer oriented professional must be!

By December 1995 my 3 month probation period finished and a new contract was offered to me: I would get a 50% salary increase. “Well done!” they said. And all I said was: “Thanks, but no thanks”. In a normal situation that is a pretty sweet salary increase, no? That was life lesson #3: an employer will always pay you the minimum they can so you don’t quit. And usually it is far from the maximum they can pay. That is why you need to know your value and you need to be aware of how much the company you are working for is able to pay somebody with your qualifications as an employee. What value do you bring to the organization? What makes you better than the alternatives? You need to know that.

After a full one day length of negotiations, the CEO of the company agreed to give me a 100% salary increase, plus commissions on the installed systems; it ended up being, in average, a 150% salary increase. And the more systems I installed, the more money I would be taking home. I still look back and that time and wonder “what would have happened had I accepted the 50% salary increase?” But I also think “what would have happened if I would have demanded a 300% salary increase?” The bottom line is that, at the end of the negotiations, we both felt like we did well. And I was happy.

And, at that moment, I felt like I was the king of the world! It wasn’t due to the increase in the salary per se, since in the grand scheme of things, I was only making then as much as my other friends (which, when I look in retrospect, is a ridiculous way to compare yourself with your peers. But, hey: I was a kid! Remember!). I was happy on realizing that I proved them (and myself) that I was more valuable than what they thought I was. I was back in the game. I could conquer anything! I went home and raised my arms to the sky a la Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption!

Within 6 months I paid my students loan and got my high school certificate. I was debt free. Life lesson #4: stay out of debt if you can. Don’t go into debt if you don’t have to. Education is key, so I would encourage anyone to try the least expensive way to get a good education. I could not avoid taking a student loan, since I took it when it was needed, 2 years into high school. I could not back down. The alternative would have been to quit the technical school and go to a regular one. It wasn’t going to happen. It would have jeopardized my future. The plan I had when I was 13 years old was to be able to start working after finishing high school.

I was ready now to go to college, although realizing that I had lost one full year of education. I was already 18 years old and was already feeling the pressure to go back to study. It felt good to be out of debt, but I had neither savings nor a monthly income that would give me many options regarding which university to attend. I had 2 questions running in circles in my head:

• Should I go to the state university to study something I don’t really like that much (Electrical Engineering), but almost for free? It would have taken me about 5 years to finish it (very unreliable time frame, as the state university was going constantly on strikes at that time!)

• Should I go to a private university and study something I really liked (Telecommunications Engineering), but having to take a loan to do so? It would have taken me 3.5 years to finish it.

I opted for a 3^rd option, which was a defining moment in my life: I decided to wait for another year and join the private college in an effort to be in a better financial position so I didn’t have to take a loan to study at the institution I wanted to study at. That decision, in June 1996, implied that I would have to wait another year to start my application to college. I would have been 2 years behind, but I would have enough savings and income to pay for university expenses…. and enough savings to buy myself a car. Why a car, you say? Let’s see:

I was working full time. 8:30 am to 5:30pm, which means that I could only attend college at nighttime… which meant that going back from the campus to my parents’ house, would have taken a good 1 hour of commuting using public transportation… I would be reaching home every night around 11 pm… not safe…not time efficient. I needed a car if I wanted to be able to reach the campus on time and wanted to have enough time to do my college assignments before going to sleep. Logistics were an issue again.

But the decision to buy a car was actually triggered by another compelling reason: it allowed me to work on my first business case. The company I worked for didn’t own a company vehicle. Every time I needed to go to visit a customer the company paid for a taxi fare. So it hit me: “if I am going to visit the customer, and the company doesn’t own a car… and I drive my own car…. and …”(do you see where this is going?). Not only would I be debt free: I would have an additional income by driving my own car to the customers and keep the taxi money in my pocket. In that case owning a car was having an asset! That was an opportunity that I only realized I had a few months into working there, but my priority was to pay first for my student loan. Once I was debt free, my mind was racing with thoughts of how to increase my income. Once I was debt free, the sky was the limit!

And so it went: I spent that year working as hard as I could to save as much as I could. I bought myself a 16 year old car, from a friend of my older brother, in February 1997. I bought it in cash, following my life lesson #4. While learning how to drive, I managed to crash that car into innumerable motionless objects: parked cars, parked trucks, garage doors, trees, etc. But that is a different story. The point is that I was happy! I had 4 wheels and a radio. I could drive anywhere I wanted to (which to me, at the time, meant anywhere within Santo Domingo!) and I wasn’t feeling any financial burden because of it. I was saving more money towards college. I was ready for the private college, so I joined in August 1997.

 

Chapter 2 . The college years

To be continued….