Et maintenant... que vais-je faire ?

I've been posting to this blog since the autumn of 2005. That's 17 years of posts. I've never really been stumped when it came to finding topics to post about. Now I'm stumped.

I've never had a job that lasted as long as Living the Life has lasted. I worked as a teacher for 11 years, between 1971 and 1982, when I was a lot younger than I am now. I taught French at the University of Illinois. I taught English in France — in Rouen, Paris, and Metz. In 1982 I decided that I was not going to continue my teaching career. I left Paris behind and moved to Washington DC. I almost decided to go to Chicago, because I knew so many people there after spending five years in Champaign-Urbana. At the last minute, I dropped that idea, thinking DC might be a place where I could use my French. It was also much closer to home, which was North Carolina, just a six or seven hour drive away.

I ended up being hired by CHM as his assistant on the editorial staff of a magazine published in English and French editions by the U.S. government for people in Africa. Two years later, the management of the agency,  the U.S. Information Agency, decided to transfer the editorial work on the French edition to Paris. The magazine was badly behind schedule, and management thought it would be easier to find competent free-lance translators in Paris than it was in DC. I was taken in by the agency's press service, which was looking for a writer/editor/reporter. They took a chance on me because I was already employed by the agency and had a security clearance. I was successful in that job, but I only stayed for two years.

Walt and I had met in Paris, and we both ended up living in Washington. We rented an apartment together on Capitol Hill in June 1983. Walt worked for a prominent member of the U.S. Congress who represented a district in southern California. He encouraged Walt to move to California and continue his university studies there. He helped make that happen. If Walt was going to California, I thought to myself, I was going too. My boss at USIA was pretty shocked when I resigned my job in September 1986 and headed west.

I didn't know what I'd do in California. Walt enrolled at San Francisco City College to complete some prerequisites that would make him qualify, he hoped, for admission to the University of California at Berkeley. Because of my work in Washington on the French-language magazine, a San Francisco company that published trade and technical magazines hired me to be managing editor of a computer magazine. I knew nothing about the computer software that the magazine published articles about, but I knew something about magazine work. The company used the same publishing system and computers that we had used at USIA, so I could hit the ground running.

I stayed there for less than three years. Walt got into Berkeley, and we wanted to stay in the city. The magazine job wasn't well paid, and it was a real grind. The editor of the computer magazine had let the magazine fall nearly six months behind schedule. Advertisers and authors were complaining. We had to put out issues on a three-week production schedule for quite a while to try to make up for lost time. The editor of the magazine lost interest and quit his job. I became executive editor, and the former assistant editor became the new editor. Still, the job was a grind, and the subject matter was not really interesting to me.

In 1989 an opportunity presented itself. My old friend Cheryl, with whom I had worked in Illinois and Paris, was working for a software company in Silicon Valley, about 50 miles south of San Francisco. She had introduced me to the manager of the documentation department at the company she worked for. They were friends and the documentation manager was looking for an editor. Cheryl knew I wasn't happy in my magazine job. It's now or never, she said to me. Send me your resume. I did. The documentation manager quickly arranged for an interview, and I passed muster. Then there was a second round of interviews that took place on the Tuesday afternoon in 1989 when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the San Francisco area, causing major damage and quite a few deaths.

That night I drove home to San Francisco. We had no electricity or phone service for several days. I hoped that I would get the documentation job in Silicon Valley, but all I could do was wait for things to get back to normal. I was scheduled to fly to Paris on a work-related trip in just two day's time when the phone finally rang. It was the hiring manager in Silicon Valley, offering me the job. I accepted. The building occupied by the magazine publisher in SF had sustained considerable earthquake damage. Only on the day before I was supposed to fly to Paris did we employees get a message saying that we would be allowed to enter the building, but at our own risk! And the airport re-opened. I went downtown to talk to my boss and tell him I had decided to resign my job as executive editor of the magazine and take a job with a Silicon Valley software company. And the next day I flew to France. Walt flew over to meet me and we spent a long weekend in Paris when my work obligations were taken care of. I was 40 years old.

So began a ten-year career in Silicon Valley. The first software company I worked for soon started going downhill. The manager who had hired me there resigned and took a position with Apple Computer's Claris software subsidiary. She promptly hired me and several other people who had been working for the first company. Together we set up a new Claris documentation department for Apple. I stayed there for six years — to the day.  Claris started going downhill too, and in 1998 Apple laid off more than half of the Claris staff, including me, on the very same January day when I had started work there in 1992.

And so it went. I took a year off and spent a couple of months in Paris and Rouen. I drove my car from California to North Carolina and back to see family and friends. At the end of that year, I found a job as an writer/editor with yet another software company. And 18 months later I left there to take an editing position with a software startup where friends of mine were working. That company was bought out by another company, and I continued working there until 2002, when I quit to take an early retirement. Walt and I had bought house in San Francisco in 1995. He was doing well in his job with the city of San Francisco, but we both were suffering from burnout. We sold the house, made a good profit, and moved to Saint-Aignan.

That was 19 years ago. As I started all this by saying, I never had a job that lasted as long as this blog. I am my own boss. But now I'm stumped. What will I do next? Continue? Go back into retirement? Move out of this house for one that's better suited to our current needs? Stay in Saint-Aignan or go elsewhere? This is what I'm thinking about these days.