agility @ sea

So perhaps it’s time to finally layout the story of my first great adventure. I’m not sure my parents would have called it an adventure at the time but perhaps where they are now they can appreciate it.

Introduction:

In 1974 I was a wild 12 year old attending a large prestigious Catholic school in Cincinnati, Ohio called Summit Country Day. The lifestyle I had developed while living in Switzerland a few years’ prior had created some bad habits that eventually got me suspended from School a few weeks prior to my 5th grade summer break. Since we were moving to St. Pete for the following year, I had a clean break from school that allowed them to be a bit more lenient than they might have otherwise been. The details of what led up to being kicked out of school are really the subject of another story so I won’t go into further details here.

My parents were exploring their family ancestry in Ireland at the time of my suspension so I was to stay home under the supervision of my Brother Craig and our full time maid Olivia. Olivia was sort of my nanny in that I spent more time with her than my parents, but she didn’t really oversee my activities as you will find out. If you saw the movie The Maid, that did a pretty good job of capturing the social norms of growing up in our 13 bedroom, 10,000 square foot mansion while being supervised by Olivia. My Mom had a busy social calendar with PTA and other responsibilities, while my Dad spent most of his time at work and traveled frequently to build his Multinational Corporation, Burke Marketing Research. Being the 5th child of busy parents left me with a certain freedom that the other kids didn’t have. For instance, two years earlier my curfew was 11:30PM. This was in Lugano, Switzerland where I was a day student at an American Boarding School. Needless to say, I could do just about anything I wanted. If there was a rule I would break it and for some reason I never seemed to get caught. On the rare occasion of getting caught, I paid the price on one hand while testing what appeared to be limitless boundaries on the other. I wasn’t what you would call a well-behaved child. Thank goodness that this stuff skips a generation. Elizabeth and Syd, you may want to consider adoption.

Years later, I think this helped me start my own company, but it took many years before I learned to create boundaries of my own. There is something about being told that I can’t do something, or more accurately that something can’t be done, that awakens a passionate need to prove that it can be done. I don’t enter into this behavior blindly. Just like never getting caught as a child, I never want to get caught failing at something I was told couldn’t be done, but the thrill of succeeding in something that others thought would fail is much sweeter than ordinary success alone. The short story of my career is that I chose several times to embrace non-mainstream technologies that had a chance to become mainstream. The three big winners were the Internet in the late 80’s and Sun’s Java programming language in 1995 and Agile development in 2003. The Internet was considered an academic novelty that would never have any commercial success. It was considered good for email or sharing documents but would never amount to anything. Sun’s Java was declared dead by Microsoft dozens of times and to this day it’s still a dominate programming language. Agile development was the biggest big and it took over a decade for it to mature into a truly mainstream development methodology but today, if you’re not practicing Agile, your likely not a competitive software company and of course, software is everything.

So back to the story, the first few days after “leaving” Summit Country Day I spent watching daytime TV. Shows like Bewitched, and The Andy Taylor Show, The Newlywed game show, were all popular at the time. My brother Craig had grounded me, but of course Olivia wasn’t what you would call a strict disciplinarian so while Craig was in Class at the University of Cincinnati I decided to amuse myself by taking my parents’ car for joyrides. First of all, let me set the record straight. Family members have told this story for years, but they got one thing wrong. I did not use a phone book so that I could see over the hood. For years, whenever I came back to Cincinnati the first thing asked when introduced was, “are you the brother that took the car?”

After the exhilaration of the first day driving my Mom’s Cutlass Supreme I became emboldened even more. Soon after I was driving my Fathers Mercedes that we picked up in Switzerland a few years earlier and I was traveling to Hyde Park, Obrianville, Mt lookout, you name it I was there on some back road exploring. I had become very familiar with the roads because I had a Vespa and traveled great distances on it the prior year and a half since returning from Switzerland.

I distinctly remember one day in Mt Lookout in my Dad’s Mercedes when a police officer drove by and I was sure he would know that I was too young to be driving a car much less a Mercedes Benz 280se. We’ll the patrolman didn’t catch me and this fueled even greater confidence to explore. I would take friends for rides. I would get something to eat. It was just like I was sixteen with my license and I could do anything I wanted. These joyrides were all cast upon the backdrop of the dread I was anticipating when my Parents got home from their trip to Ireland. My father having grown up on the Family farm in Ohio was the traditional enforcer of discipline in our family. The biggest threat my Mom every had was, “wait till you Father gets home, or I’m going to tell your Father when he gets home.” Fortunately, Father wasn’t home that often and I got away with just about everything. But when I did get caught, Dad could put the fear of God in me and I was not looking forward to his wrath when they got home. So when things got about as bad as they could, what did I do, make them worse of course. But I’ll save the next segment for another night.