Career, Family And Living For The Lord
-
A Twenty-Five Year History

I continued working for PRC for the rest of that year and into the next. But in May 1977, I left to go to work for the Government because of a rift which I had had with the company. After my work on GADS, everyone at PRC had been very pleased. My immediate supervisor had even hinted that I should be getting a pretty good pay raise that year as special compensation for my extraordinary efforts. As a young person with a good education and proven skills, trying to get my career off the ground, and as a parent with four children at home, I felt that that promised pay increase was not only warranted but also very much needed.

In November 1976, when I had my annual review, I got a fairly good pay raise, but I did not feel that I had gotten a really special pay raise. I felt that I had probably had the best year of anyone in my office, therefore I thought that I deserved the biggest pay raise. Even though I did not know what anyone else had been given, I did not think that I had been given the best. For one thing, I had received a negative mark on my evaluation because of something which I felt was stupid. PRC did not give its employees any sick leave, so if you were sick, you were expected to make the time up. Everyone in the office, including I, thought that the company's sick leave policy was shameful, but like employees usually do, we learned to live with it.

One way that a worker could make up sick time was by either writing or editing company resumes in their free time. During the Summer of 1976, I had been given the opportunity to make up a negative two hours of sick leave by writing company resumes, but I told my supervisor that I was not interested. When he wrote my annual evaluation, he seemed to be more bothered by my negative two hours of sick leave than he was pleased by my superior performance. He gave me a low grade for not having been a company player, and that made me very angry! I did not lash out at him at that or any other time for what I viewed as his very foolish position. But I did decide while sitting there that it was time for me to leave. I expressed some mild concern about the size of my pay raise, and he went back to the company and got me a bigger raise. But my mind had already been made up. It was time to leave!

During those days, trouble came in bunches. I was not having problems with my job. But I was having problems with my employer, and I was wanting, though not yet seeking, new employment. Debbie had left home. And of course, Linda and I were still struggling with the same nonstop, economic problems which we had always had, economic problems which seemed to be without end. Then, in the midst of those trials, we had yet another problem at home, and this time, it was with Michael again! I stated earlier that he usually took care of his own difficulties, and that was basically true. But on this last occasion, Linda and I would again have to become involved in a mess which he had made for himself and us.

I came home from work on what seemed to be a normal day in early December 1976. When I saw Linda, I immediately knew that something was wrong, so I inquired. She told me that the Assistant Principal of Garfield High School had called and told her that Michael had not been in class for most of the first semester. We were shocked that we had not been notified earlier, but for some reason, we had not been. In all, I think that between September and that particular day in December he had only attended about five to ten days and maybe not even that much! Linda was very upset, and so was I! Not only that, but when we confronted Michael about what he had done, he concurred with the Assistant Principal's assessment and did not even offer an explanation. He was guilty and did not seem to care that he had done something which was so wrong. He also did not seem to be too concerned that he was possibly on the way to wrecking his life.

Ten years earlier, in 1966, I had made the identical mistake, having flunked out of college with just about all "F"s. Midway through the first semester of my freshman year, I had stopped going to class. Then, in the second semester, I had registered for six more classes, but I had not gone to any of those classes, either. After a year of that kind of recklessness, I was suspended from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. I eventually trusted my life to Christ, got my life back on track, and even earned my college degree. But it was not easy for me to overcome all of those failing grades and that early history of failure! As I sat, pondering Michael and his situation, I realized that I wanted to do something more than just yell and cast out idle, parental-type threats. As a parent, I have always known that threatening your children is risky because, most of the time, those threats are very difficult to enforce. Therefore, I sat in my chair, trying to think of a way that I could really wake him up and get his attention. I did not want to treat his actions lightly, plus I also very much wanted him to have a real sense of what he had done. As I was looking for a way to deal with this particular problem, it suddenly hit me what I had to do!

For several years, Linda and I had attended two different, strict, fundamentalist Baptist churches. She and I were both young Christians, and we did not have all the answers. Many times, in fact, we did not feel like we had any of the answers! She and I had wrestled over such things as whether or not to have a short Bible devotion before dinner. It was almost always awkward, but for the long-term benefit of the kids, we usually tried, during those days, to have some kind of short devotion. She and I had wrestled over whether or not to "make" our kids go to church. They were nearing their teen years and getting them to "want" to go was like pulling teeth. So, we often went back and forth on how to handle that problem. Another issue in our family was "long hair!"

During the seventies, most boys had long hair, and Michael was no exception. He had had the same long, stringy hair flowing down toward his shoulders that most of the guys of that period had. Both of our pastors had preached against long hair, but Linda and I had often spoken about it and had decided to overlook the length of his hair as long as he behaved. As I sat in my chair thinking about all of these things, I began to associate Michael's long hair with his rebellious attitude. In my mind, his long hair had given him an association with a particular crowd, and on that day in December, I did not want him to continue that association. I did not want Michael to follow in the same path which I had traveled and to someday have to feel the same sense of failure which I had felt and even still feel. So, I got up from my chair and did what I truly felt was the greatest long-term benefit for him.

I took Michael, my seventeen year old son, into the bathroom. In those days, we could not afford to pay for haircuts, so Linda had always cut my hair. I took the shears from our haircutting set, told Michael that one day he "might" thank me for what I was about to do, and then began to cut. I am not a barber. Michael's haircut was the only haircut that I have ever given, and it looked like it! When I was done, he retreated to his bedroom, laid on his bed, and covered his head. He stayed in his room for the rest of that week, which I think was Thursday and Friday, and then through the weekend. He did not even come out to eat, so Linda had to take food into him. Needless to say, my actions did not bring peace and harmony to our already troubled family. In fact, most of the family was very mad at me and very sympathetic towards him. But I had done what I thought was best and even what I had thought was commensurate with the crime. I had not acted hastily or in anger. Instead, I had carefully thought through the whole thing before doing anything. Therefore, I was prepared to stand my ground no matter how strong the opposition.

Michael finally came out of his bedroom when I went to work on Monday. I was not there at the time, but Linda told me later that he had said that he might as well join the Army if he had to wear his hair so short. She asked if he was serious. He said that he was, so she put him in the car and took him straight to the Army Recruiter. Linda has always thought that the military is good for a young man, and I agree. Because he was only seventeen, she had to sign. But she did, and on that day, Michael enlisted in the Army! I think that it was perhaps the very next day that he left for boot camp. After that, Michael had a few more problems, but he never troubled us with any of them. Through that experience of skipping school and getting a haircut, he had been separated from a crowd which we thought was bringing him down. But as an Army recruit, he was on his way to becoming a man.

Since those difficult times, he has always given Linda and me plenty of reasons to be proud of him, and today, we are! He is married to a wonderful young lady named Mary Ann, he has two very precious daughters, named Michelle ("Jumpin' Up And Down") and Marlene, and he runs his own business, which is doing very well.

In December 1976, the Government side of my office, which was NAVCOSSACT, advertised for multiple GS-11 and GS-12 Computer Specialist positions. When the announcements first came out, I asked Joe if he thought that I could get one of those positions, and he told me that he did. During that month, I filled out the necessary Government application, an SF-171, and submitted it for one of the GS-12 positions. Most of my fellow-PRC employees did the same, although not everyone applied for the GS-12 positions. I had earned a Masters Degree which the others did not have. Therefore, I thought that it made sense for me to go for the more advanced opening.

Suddenly, it became obvious to all of us at PRC that most of us wanted out of that office, and in almost every case, it was for the exactly same reason - NO SICK LEAVE! On one occasion, our immediate supervisor lectured to us about the company's policy. His name was Hal, and he told us that getting so upset about the company's sick leave policy was being very petty. So, as a group, we united in one accord and responded to him that we were very petty!

Deciding to go to the Government was a quick and easy decision, but actually getting a Government job was not so speedy. All of us in that office, which was about nine or ten, had applied for one of the multiple openings, but by April, no one had heard anything. Finally, in May, I received notification that I had been accepted and that NAVCOSSACT wanted me to come on board as a GS-12, Step 1. Making the move would mean that I would be getting about a fifteen percent pay raise and that I would go from ten to twenty days of vacation per year and be given thirteen days of sick leave each and every year. For me and the others, moving from PRC to the Government was a no-brainer, so I and most of my PRC co-workers made the move in May 1977! A short while later, NAVCOSSACT changed its name and became known as NAVELEX, short for Navy Electronic Systems.

By July 1977, I had established myself with the Department of Defense and was doing well with my work. At home, though, we were still struggling financially. Our problems were not that I was making a bad salary. Part of the difficulty was that I did not know much about handling money. Another part was that I was still a junior-to-mid-level employee, yet I had a very big family. I once thought that whereas most young people start out with a starter home, Linda and I had always had to think in terms of three-to-four bedrooms. In many ways, we had had to hit the ground running right from the very first day of our marriage, rather than have some time to build. Because of the way we got started, we never had a real opportunity to establish any kind of financial base or anything like that.

For a period of eight months during those difficult years, we could not even afford a telephone. Once, during the winter, I was sick with the flu, and it was snowing outside. Thus, with all of the symptoms of influenza, I had to walk about a half mile, in very cold, damp weather, to a nearby Seven-Eleven Store so that I could call into work to tell them that I would not be in for the day. Our neighbor had graciously offered to let me use her phone, but I would not do that. Perhaps part of my reasoning was based on pride, but another part was based at least a little on a type of spiritual stubbornness. I had felt that the Lord had allowed us in that position because He had wanted us to be in that position. Therefore, I would not allow myself to take what I had rationalized to be the easy way out of whatever it was that He was trying to let us experience. I do not know if that kind of thinking was very intelligent or not, but that is how I felt.

Another time during those years, our family of six had to go about one year without medical insurance. I worked in an environment where group insurance was available, and the rates were not that bad. But they were bad enough that I could not afford them. For another period, we had to let our automobile insurance expire. So, for about six months, we drove around without insurance. I share all of these things because I want to make it clear that we were very, very poor. As I look around these days, I do not see many who really do without the way that we did. In these times of easy credit, most people just borrow against their future earnings so that they can have today those things which they need or want. But Linda and I were already borrowed out, so we could not just do that.

In the Spring of 1976, when I was trying to buy the tires for our car, give my paycheck away to the church, and redevelop GADS, I had also been trying to go to Northern Virginia Community College. I did not have any interest in gaining more education, but I did have a very big interest in getting the GI Bill. From my perspective, I could go to school a couple of nights a week and get a few hundred dollars per month from the Government. So, I signed up for two freshman-level Electronics courses and started back to school. However, my plan did not go as I had hoped. The Government rejected my claim for the GI Bill because, in their words, I was over-qualified for the courses that I had taken. Of course, they were right, but I fought their decision anyway.

Finally, after arguing back and forth with them for a few months, I gave up on the idea of ever getting paid for having taken those two classes. To me, that meant a loss of income which I had already earned, plus it also meant a loss of future income that I might be able to earn. In 1976, the courses that I had taken were about fifty-four dollars each, eighteen dollars per credit hour, and the GI Bill would have paid me about four hundred dollars per month. Thus, it was a terrific opportunity to make some extra money if only I could have made it work. But it was not to be, so I stopped taking classes after those first two.

In July 1977, about fifteen months after my lost battle over the GI Bill, Linda and I had to deal with yet another financial crisis. This time, our former neighbor from Hampton called to inform us that the people who were renting our home had vacated. Until we got that call, we had not realized that anything was up. After the call, of course, our first concern was how to pay that month's house payment. I had not paid the one hundred dollar payment in May or June because we had not had the money. Then, with the vacating of our renters, the July payment was suddenly at risk, and once again, we would be brought to a critical point in our financial household.

Linda, mostly, and I, some, started trying to get our house in Hampton in somewhat reasonable shape so that we could sell it. Of course, money was a clear problem, so we tried to do our best to balance finances and needs. I was not able to pay the July house payment, either, so that put us three months past due. I was also two months past due with a second mortgage which I had taken out from the Navy Federal Credit Union, and we were late on our utilities and starting to get cutoff notices. Our predicament was both pathetic and frustrating! I was a computer professional, with a good education and making good money, but Linda and I were still having a very tough time paying even the most necessary bills.

On one Saturday during that July, the mail came, and I sat in my chair looking at all the bills which I could not pay. We had received a foreclosure notice on our house in Hampton. We had been sent a late notice for the second mortgage, and of course, we had already received some cutoff notices for our utilities. Linda and I were still running our church bus route, still doing our best to live for the Lord, and still doing our best to take care of our family. But as I looked at those immediate bills, knowing that I did not have any money to pay them, I became very frustrated. Then, I became very angry, perhaps even angry at the Lord. I could not understand why He was making us go through such extreme difficulty when we were trying so hard to serve Him. At that point, like so many times before, I felt myself being moved in a very clear, yet very risky direction.

I took all the bills in my hand and went downstairs to our bedroom. I closed and locked the door, fell on my knees and began to pray. As I talked to the Lord, I could feel myself being led to do something which was absolutely stupid, even insane, but I still felt that leading anyway, whether it was stupid or not. I continued to pray, and then I did again what I had done sixteen months earlier in that KMart Shopping Center when I had been questioning whether or not to buy a set of tires which I could not afford. I took my Bible, opened it, and read the first verse that I saw. That verse was Psalms 55:22, and it said, "Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee. He shall never suffer the righteous to be moved."

After reading the verse, I prayed a little more, and then, I did what I felt the Lord leading me to do. I grabbed my checkbook, and I wrote checks to each of our creditors for the amounts that would bring all of our accounts up to date. In all, I wrote about nine hundred and twenty-five dollars worth of checks, and I did not have "any" money in the bank to cover them. I also did not have any convenient paydays just around the corner to bail me out. But in my complete frustration and desperation, I actually did what everyone has probably wished, at one time or another, that they could do. After writing the checks, I sealed every one, put stamps on them, and went straight to the nearest mailbox and dropped them in. Then, I went home to tell Linda what I had done!

Not so surprisingly, Linda was a little upset. But amazingly, after a few hours, she actually calmed down and started talking to me again. Just a few years ago, in 1995, she and I were talking about that day in 1977 and sharing with each other how we had both felt. It was, then, in 1995, eightteen years later, that I learned from her why she had only remained angry with me for a couple of hours, and to me, this is totally awesome! In 1977, after I had told her what I had done, she got alone to herself and started to pray. Ironically or miraculously, take your choice, she had felt led to open her Bible to see what the Lord was trying to say to her. It was not until we talked about all of this in 1995 that I learned for the very first time that she had opened her Bible, you have probably already guessed it, to the exact same verse which I had found - Psalms 55:22! In our day of absolute financial frustration and desperation, the Lord had given each of us, at different times of the day, the very same verse for comfort.

Our Lord truly is amazing. It is at a time like this moment, as I write these words, that I truly feel sorry for the Big Bang theorists and Evolutionists of this world who only have hope in some cataclysmic event which they cannot prove or even really understand. For Linda and me, the Lord has always proven Himself over and over again, and He continues to do so, even today. But this story is not over yet! There is still more to tell. For the first four or five days after I had mailed all those bad checks, I practically raced to the mailbox to find out if we had gotten any mail. I did not know what to expect, but I sort of thought that I would either have some kind of miraculous bail of cash awaiting me or a handful of bounced checks and angry creditors to handle. Finally, on day six, it happened!

I had gotten a letter from the U.S. Tresury, in an envelope similar to that of a tax refund or a savings bond. I could see that a check was inside, so I anxiously opened it! There was also a letter from the U.S. Treasury telling me, sixteen months after my battle over the GI Bill, that they had for some reason reviewed my case and determined that I was owed some money. Included with that letter was a check for $963.28. Six days earlier, I had fallen on my face before the Lord and prayed earnestly, asking Him for help and guidance. At that time, I had felt Him leading me to do something which could have easily gone very badly for Linda and me. But on the hope of a single verse in the Bible, Psalms 55:22, I did it anyway. I do not think that a person should do what I did, and I certainly would not recommend that anyone try some of the things which I have done in this life. Nevertheless, I did do what I had felt the Lord wanted me to do, and for whatever His reasons, He did choose on that occasion to hold me up. I cannot boast in myself for this or anything else, but I can and do boast in Him.

During those difficult years, Linda and I were the recipients of special blessings on other occasions, as well. Once, we had our parents staying with us for the weekend. On Sunday, she had preset our stove to cook our lunch while we were in church. But for some reason, the timer mechanism had not worked, and we came home to an unprepared meal. My father said no problem, and he and I went to buy some fried chicken for lunch. While at the chicken outlet, he decided to buy two extra buckets of food. He did not know at the time that Linda and I did not have any more food in our house and that we were already trying to figure out how to feed our own family once everyone was gone. We were able to get by on the food which had not cooked, plus the leftovers from the chicken meal, until my payday at the end of the week. On other occasions, my dad brought us can foods from where he had been able to get special deals.

Once, Linda and I had gone to a co-worker's house to get some rose bushes that his wife and he did not want. While we were there, Imrie invited us to take some apples from an apple tree in his back yard. We were running low on food at that time, too, so we loaded up. For the next week or so, Linda found every conceivable way to cook apples, and that is what we ate. About ten years later, when this same friend was on his deathbed dying of cancer, I had the joy of telling him that the Lord had used him in a very special way on that day to feed a hungry, struggling Christian family. My friend left this world with a tear of joy in his heart and eyes, knowing that he had been a part of doing the Lord's work in my life.

On another occasion when food was running low, Linda's sister, Delores, and her husband, Bill, got a special deal on turkeys. They had bought themselves some, but they had also purchased us four. We put them in our freezer, and over the next few months, we ate a lot of turkey! As I look back over these past twenty-five years and all of the many things which have happened to us, it is easy for me to see that Linda and I have been greatly blessed in this life. Now, it is important for me to tell those around me that our Lord gets all the glory and honor for that which He has done for us.

With all of our financial struggles, I felt like I was leading a double life, and each one was at an opposite extreme. Professionally, everything was going exceptionally well. I was getting a lot of the right kind of exposure at work, and it seemed that the right kind of people were starting to notice me. That side of my life was practically without flaw, but financially at home, everything was altogether different. We continued to have it tough, but to Linda's credit, she never complained about our financial predicament. Like me, she also worked very hard, trying to make extra dollars so that we could try to cover our costs. Fortunately, we had been able to sell our house in Hampton during the summer of 1977, and the proceeds from that sale had actually gotten us caught up on our finances for the first time since we had been married six years earlier. After that important sale, she and I never again had things as tough as they had been during those first years.

I had started my Government career with NAVELEX in May 1977, and my first assignment, since GADS had officially been declared "dead," was a system called RTGEN, short for Route Generation. RTGEN was a mathematician's heaven, since it was a mathematical model used for routing ships throughout the different waters of the world. In RTGEN, there were river routes, special stored routes, chords, circles, overlapping circles, concave and convex polygons, line intersections, and great circle and rhumbline computations. Working on that system opened my eyes to some mathematics which I had either forgotten or never known. For example, I had always known that a point (x,y), which is on a line, when substituted into the equation for that line, would produce a result of zero. However, what I had not known was that if the same point were to the right of the line, then the value when substituted into the line's equation would be less than zero. If the point were to the left, then the value would be greater than zero. That simple algebraic concept was used throughout RTGEN to determine if a point on the world's map was either inside or outside of a particular line segment.

My job was to make corrections to the algorithm whenever the tricky mathematics gave the wrong solution. One example of an obvious flaw was that a route from Norfolk to Singapore would go eastward through the Mediterranean Sea and Suez Canal enroute to the destination of Singapore. But if a route were requested from Philadelphia to Singapore, which should have been basically the same as from Norfolk, then RTGEN would provide a westward route that went through the Panama Canal enroute to Singapore. In mileage, the distance, when going through the Panama Canal, was much greater, but a flaw in the algorithm had been responsible for producing the incorrect direction. For a couple of years, I had had to fix problems like that, and I really enjoyed it. I even built a test file of every troubled route that I fixed so that whenever I made changes to the system, I could run my special "regression" test to make sure that all the past fixes were still working.

This route generation system existed as a standalone system and also as an embedded, overlayed program in a much larger system. I had a problem once where the same route request entered into the two separate versions of this same program were giving radically different answers. That particular problem had been known by others in our office for a number of years, but no one had ever determined the reason for the problem. In the normal course of maintaining this system, however, I had placed a number of print statements, sometimes called debug statements, into the program so that I could run it and examine various, intermediate computations. When looking at the problem between the two separate versions, I ran the same route through each, and my debug statements clearly showed that, in one instance, the overlayed version had not loaded in the correct overlay prior to executing a particular program. The system was still jumping to where the program was supposed to be, but another program was there and being executed. That problem was fun to solve, and once again, my supervisors recognized my abilities to work with complex systems and solve difficult problems.

In all fairness, though, I must confess one mistake which I did make on that route generation system. I had convinced my boss that I could rewrite the whole program and make it much better. I turned out to be wrong, but no one ever found out. I had gotten his permission to do the exploratory work, but I eventually got to a point where my new and improved algorithm started to fall apart in much the same way that the original algorithm had. No one ever found out that I had not succeeded, however, because about the time that I began having problems, funding dried up for RTGEN, and I was moved to yet another project. From most everyone's point of view, I had merely been prevented another opportunity to demonstrate my genius. But in truth, I had been kept from showing that I could not do any better with the problems of RTGEN than those who had come before me.

I learned something about software development and professionals, in general, though, from my "secret" failure with RTGEN. Often, we as computer professionals frown on or put down the work of other computer professionals, trying to show or suggest that they are not as smart as we. However, I have come to realize that that is probably not true in most cases. There are a lot of very intelligent people in this industry, and as much as I might wish to deny it, some of them are even much more intelligent than I. My goal is never, in any matter, to put down another so that I might somehow find a way to lift up myself. After all of these years, I am still thankful that the Lord has given me so many marvelous opportunities to apply my own mathematical skills, whatever they may or may not be, and I am not bothered so much by the fact that there are those who are smarter at it and better than I.