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I returned with $108 to my name and an experience without price.
Work as refinery Engineer - that is; greasy overalls, hard hat and steel-toed boots - wasn't really my interest and I jumped at the chance to do a few odd analysis jobs. Something must have been done right because I ended up in Head Office Supply in a real Refinery Analysis job! Putting dollars to investment and operational plans and sorting out complex logistical issues was much more satisfying.
A variety of jobs within Supply and later Logistics certainly maintained my professional interest but I was having great problems dealing with the culture at Mobil and my own gradual coming out; more particularly I began to have severe personal conflicts with some influential people over my (suspected) being gay and these got much more intense after I actually did come out and took Dale along to several functions. (With, I should add, the support of the majority of my collegues).
It is a hard thing to do first time around and there is little to guide you.
First you deal with your own feelings about yourself, and then you worry about what those close to you will think. Finally you worry about how work colleagues and others in general may treat you and what sort of prospects you have for life and a career as a consequence.
But I'm not the first and I dare say I won't be the last. Being able to stand openly beside a partner that you love and who loves you in return is more than enough; let alone being able to be honest with the family and friends that you like and admire.
Easy to say at 34 and in a long-term relationship and rather easier to manipulate others perceptions after you have learnt how to do it; it's not so easy at 16 or even 26 - "On Being Gay" was not even the smallest part of my sex or relationship education (let alone for the straight World in general).
So, I think I drove several bosses near to distraction over "what to do about him, I just cannot work it out". It had been made plainly clear to me by those influencial people who had a problem with me being gay that I should expect no career at "Mobil" - and certainly not one long-term - and I know of many occasions when they acted against me for this reason alone.
Hardly surprisingly I was quite demoralised and the usual "motivators" (carrots and sticks) just weren't working; one neeeds to understand how I was feeling at the time - I didn't believe I would be fairly recognised so any promises were automatically discounted and it is hardly worth threatening someone over their job when their mind has some much bigger concerns to deal with.
Instead I ran a double life; with me happy with my family life away from work but having it removed from my professional life. At that time I simply needed to turn my attention toward myself as a person rather than spending time doing the things necessary to get on in Mobil Corporate life (and no, the two seem not always to run in parallel!). Naturally, that did not help the situation as it made me appear indifferent about my career. I recognised that at the time and it caused me great pain to know that but this also just happened to be the time and place for me to deal with this "other thing".
To cut a long story short; Mobil Australia bought in consultants to "review the process" and we all know where those exercises end up... with redundancies. The Australian oil industry provides for enormous redundancy payouts and I saw this as a perfect opportunity to escape. Only problem was, none of this was on a voluntary basis and there was a great deal of suspicion that if "management" had it in for you (or if they thought you were thinking of leaving anyway) they would make sure you got an offer of a bad job from which you would just resign. That way they saved the expense of paying you out, and still ended up with you gone.
It needed over 12 months of machiavellian scheming and pulling in every favour I was owed to weasel into a position of that huge payout. And with the leaving of Mobil to get my MBA I began a new part of my life. Boy, what a load off!
As for the question "How would you do things different today?" - there is one major difference between then and now and that has to do with my own feelings about myself and my place in this World. I know there were many good people in Mobil at the time - I am still friends with a great number of them - who could have helped me deal with these twisted individuals if I had been open at work and felt able to take those same good people into my confidence and rely on their help.
I simply would not tolerate such threats or behaviour from anti-gay individuals today and the way I would respond would be utterly different. There may have been others at Mobil that were anti-gay but who at least kept their behaviour - at work - on a professional level. That I can cope with (time alters people like this, and I've grown to at least understand people are not wholly responsible for the anti-gay attitudes they have absorbed through their lives).
I have also learned, with time, that while many people hold negative attitudes towards homosexuality as a concept these same people do not usually hold negative attitudes towards gay individuals that they know. This was a powerful insight and one I have since used to good effect. I know that I can turn these people around - starting with their attitude that "Grant is OK, even if he has a flaw..." and having them see I am actually just a typical gay and not "one of the good ones". But that takes time, and you need to be open about your sexuality.
Obviously that was not to be so during my years at Mobil and that, alone, is the one thing I wish I could have additionally been able to do in all my time there.
No regrets though - how could I regret even a bad experience if it has contibuted to the person I am pleased to be today?
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