Let’s see, how far back should I go...

Technically, my first job was the summer after I turned 14, but that’s probably not....well, it’s at least a good story, and one thing I like to do, is tell stories.

My grandfather owned a Marina in Chesapeake Beach, MD, and he hired me that summer to pick up the mail 6 days a week and deliver it to the office. I would walk from our house where my mom and I lived with him and my Grandma, down the hill in the muggy Maryland air, full of the scent of Old Bay and low tide, pack the bundles of envelopes into my bag and travel across the bridge, between the community center and water park, over the parking lot crowded with trucks and trailer hitches, to the marina office. I would sort out the mail, making two piles: one for his real estate business which went upstairs to his personal office, and a second one for the marina business, which would go to my Grandma.

Fishing Creek Landings Marina had started out as a dirt lot with two ramps, and when my grandfather, a financial consultant and retired pastor, purchased the land, he already knew that he wanted to turn it into an accessible and family-friendly seasonal business. This little beach town had once been known as a tourist destination in the early 1900’s, boasting a boardwalk, a roller coaster, and a ferris wheel, as well as a dedicated train line from DC. The Depression in the mid-thirties caused things to shut down, but the town in the late nineties was starting to want to come back to their roots. When I would come up to my grandfather’s office, he would have the blueprints for different town projects laid out on a large conference table: designs for expanding the marina, building a football, baseball, and soccer field for local kid’s leagues, and the development of a Water Park. He wasn’t a designer himself, but he made it a point to learn from those he hired and pay attention to important details. He studied how larger theme parks laid out their attractions and pushed to incorporate accessibility from the start.

He was my first teacher in responsibility and hard work. I was paid an hour a day for my delivery, and over time I was trusted with more tasks. The next summer I was working part-time at the marina, and the rest of the time at the water park, as a certified shallow water lifeguard. At the marina, I would guide cars for parking, check on boats, pump gas, and clean the bathrooms. At the park, I learned CPR and rescue techniques, how to take charge of a crisis and to always wear sunscreen. The next summer I was old enough to handle money by state laws, so I was given a raise and allowed to watch and run the marina store. I would stock inventory and put together the nightly deposit in the safe for my Grandmother. She was in charge of running the day-to-day business and building up their customer base, so that they could generate year-long income from people who would need a place to store their boats in the off season. We also sold fishing licenses and monitored a radio for weather alerts and emergencies.

By the time I graduated high school, I was able to open the marina, run it through the day on the weekends, and close for the night, as well as do the bank deposits as needed. When my grandparents went on vacation, I would also be trusted to open all their mail, organize it based on priority, and email them daily updates. They would communicate what correspondence was needed and ask me to reach out to people on their behalf. I was still also working at the water park during the summer, and split my paychecks between helping my mom pay our monthly bills, and saving for college.

I originally wanted to go to college to be a writer. When I wasn’t working, I was reading, and my head was filled with ideas. I wrote poetry and parts of different short stories in my downtime. My mom had trained to be a teacher, and she taught me to read before I entered kindergarten. Any book I could get my hands on, I would thumb through and take its measure. Her love of fantasy novels, of Tolkien and Lewis, translated into my own love today of Gaiman and Lackey. It was this love that told me I should go to school for an English degree, work as a teacher and write books at night.

My first year of college, I worked and went to the local community college, borrowing the marina truck to drive to classes. I paid for both semesters out of pocket with my savings, including a summer semester. My sophomore year, I transferred to UMBC an hour away and moved onto campus, with a friend I had met at the water park for a roommate. She came part and parcel with an existing friend group, and very quickly I found that my ability to be organized and successful came mostly from my isolation and not through any proficiency in self discipline. It was fascinating, still, to take classes on Shakespeare and Applied Linguistics, a class that inspired me to consider changing my major. I developed the dream that I could instead take business classes and open up a publishing company, one that worked with local colleges to help new writers and artists get their ideas out into the world.

This was around the time that the webcomic was becoming very popular and the idea of having a blog or a website was just starting to gain traction. Publishing companies were still the main gateway to having a writing career, and I felt that I could open up an opportunity for many of my peers. In my dream, I would run the publishing company from an office, above a bookstore and bakery, in a refurbished warehouse. The bookstore would cater to the local university, and the bakery would offer better foods and study areas for students and faculty. Each bakery, if we were able to grow to a chain, would be decorated with the art from the local students, and on the weekends they would focus on local bands. I had grown up seeing my grandfather build a similar business, and the effect that had on our local community. It was possible, and if I could learn the skills I needed, I could find others to help me build it.

Unfortunately, my financial aid fell through, for the simple reason that the paperwork we had given to UMBC after filing my FAFSA for my Junior year, had a typo. It used to be that once a school received your form, you would request and submit to them copies of your parent’s tax returns, to confirm the amounts listed. You would also have to initial the bottom of each page, stating that all the information on the tax return was accurate. My mother and I had been receiving an annuity from the government as part of a package my father had set up before he passed, and it added up to about $4k a year. On my mother’s tax returns, however, it had been typo’d that year as $40k, and I was deemed ineligible for financial aid.

Sounds like an easy fix, right? Obviously someone, somewhere, had made an error and our bank statements could show the amount of payments we were getting. Any audit of my mother’s finances would show we had been living in government housing and getting a good portion of our groceries from her church’s food bank. Still, when I visited UMBC’s understaffed financial aid office, I was told that my file had already been reviewed and the funds, once allocated for my account, had been moved to someone else. I would have to find some other way to pay for the rest of the year quickly, or the classes I wanted for the spring semester would fill up. Not only that, but the apartment I shared with three other students was paid for by my refunds each semester from the aid I received, through an agreement that the leasing company had with the school. Pretty soon, I was behind on rent, stuck in a rock and a hard place between where I lived, where I went to school, and the IRS, none of whom wanted to admit that a simple mistake had been made. I audited my classes and went every couple days to plead my case at the financial aid office, updating my landlord weekly, all while looking for work in nearby Baltimore, but eventually I had to give up, and move back home without finishing my degree.

Back to the beach I went, school loans in hand, and within a month I was working at the delivery counter for a local pizza restaurant. Soon after that, a Curves, and then a bank, and about a year after coming home, I got a job in a Verizon Wireless call center, and rented my own apartment. My partner proposed and turned into my fiance, and we both tried to work on getting an education, them for the first time going to college and me for the second. I took classes at CCBC, down the street from UMBC, and studied Business Management, partially because it was one of the degrees Verizon would pay for, and for the other part, I had never really let go of my idea. Perhaps it just hadn’t been the right time.

My partner excelled in school, getting their associates at CCBC and then enrolling in UMass Lowell back in their home state of Massachucetts. So we relocated and while they worked hard in school, I taught classes at the local Verizon store on how to use a smartphone. In my downtime, I started playing with HTML as a hobby, seeing how simple it was to put something online, and finding how much I enjoyed designing. I left Verizon shortly after that for a job at Constant Contact, where I started out in their call center, but was promoted up to their Campaign Design team. There I got to really sink my teeth into Graphic and Web Design, as the role involved developing marketing material for small businesses and nonprofits. Some of the companies we worked with didn’t even yet have a logo, just a website with some information, so we would do our best to create something as a placeholder, insert it into an email campaign template and offer it up to them as a way to start sending mailers. The older version of the email builder allowed us to change html and get very creative with our base templates, while also testing them to ensure they had a low risk of being treated as spam, and followed good design principles regardless of what platform the email was opened on. Eventually, Constant Contact migrated to a more drag and drop builder and we had to redo our templates, so that customers could still keep their existing designs, but edit them in a less code-heavy tool.

Around the time I started at Constant Contact, I also was recruited to work for a non-profit organization back in Maryland. A friend of mine had been working for Otakorp, an organization that runs a yearly anime convention, with the goal of “promoting the appreciation of Asian culture, primarily through its media and entertainment.” Otakon, the name of their convention, generated millions of tourism dollars in revenue for Baltimore, before their move in 2017 to a facility in D.C. I was asked to take over management of their Accessibility Department, as my friend’s health was suffering and he was no longer able to keep up with everything required. I kept him on staff as part of the team, as he had put serious time into building a policy that would not just meet regulations, but also incorporate proactive and preventative measures, to help ensure guests could focus on enjoying the event. What he needed was someone who could step in and build off of that, and help the rest of the event staff understand and follow the same policy as if it were second nature. Since he was only one person, the act of running a department for a convention that regularly brought 35K guests to Baltimore every summer, implementing, training staff, and ensuring compliance of this policy had become a real challenge. My first year, I worked as his assistant, seeing how things worked during the event and meeting other Department Heads. I was able to get a lot of valuable insight through this, and requested that in the off season, we schedule meetings with the Head above myself. This allowed me to refine and plan to hit the ground running the following year.

Working with Otakon was an unpaid position, but I took a lot of pride and enjoyment in my work. Every year, myself and my team would meet people whose lives our efforts directly affected. Our ASL interpreter had a following, and fans of the jokes he would work into his signing would come to our booth to meet him and take pictures. I would come home exhausted from solid 16-hour days, but reinvigorated and with a sense of purpose. I grew the Department staff by recruiting people from staff pools and other departments that showed an affinity with conflict resolution, and had backgrounds in medical fields. My role eventually became to put out fires, as my staff grew more comfortable making on the spot decisions on how best to help convention patrons. On top of that, since my staff had connections in other parts of the organization, we were able to reach back out to those areas and train other staffers, so that eventually the Accessibility policy became less of a special rule, and more of a “business as usual for all involved.” With the convention moving to D.C, which offered a more modern and updated facility, I revamped our policy and oversaw the first year in the new building. At this point I retired and passed the role to one of my team, a young lady who had stepped up and shown she could handle the responsibility. A few months later, another convention approached me with the offer to handle their accessibility team, and even though I was intrigued, I referred them to another member of my staff who was not only a regular at their convention, but was another individual with the skills and determination needed. The experience left me with a passion for developing a team, and the satisfaction of seeing those people grow and succeed, and a desire to find other ways to support the growth of more ADA-friendly public spaces.

I left Constant Contact when my partner and I married in 2017. Constant Contact had been bought out by Endurance the year before and the culture changes that it brought made it no longer such a good fit. Instead I took a role with a local startup called IFS Core, and worked as part of their Support and informal QA team. They were building software that allowed construction and HVAC workers out in the field to better communicate with their home offices, as many of those firms utilized a program called Sage in their workflow, but it had no mobile component. It required the customer to install an additional component on their dedicated Sage server, and then provided a web interface that both office and off-site workers could utilize to manage invoices and change orders. Since it was a small company at the time, they did their best to move fast and be unafraid to break things, which let them accomplish a lot, but also alienated many of their customers. Their release schedule planned for a software update on Friday, but without giving the changes time in a dedicated testing server. They really had no time to make careful decisions, as they were growing so fast, and soon were buying an office in Boston to expand their engineering staff. Unfortunately, they soon had to go through layoffs, and I was given an apology and a financial package to provide for me in the interim.

This happened only a few months before Covid struck, which completely changed my priorities. Everyone was working from home, and I instead focused my energies on learning how to cook the foods we missed and keep our home comfortable and safe. By that first summer, I had more time for my hobbies, which led my partner to suggest I consider going to school for Web Design. UMass Lowell had a Web Design certificate that encompassed six classes, so I made the commitment that if I could do well in those six classes, I would keep going. Three semesters later, I had a 4.0 and that certificate in my hands, so I kept going. I met with a counselor and transferred all my credits from my earlier years, which filled in most of the general requirements. This let me focus instead on learning Javascript, Python, and expanding my skills with HTML and CSS. I took two classes in C, and rewarded my inner book aficionado with a course in Authurian literature in my final semester.

That original idea of a bookstore and a bakery would perhaps not work as well in 2024, but still that idea of creating something and putting it out there for others to see captures my imagination. In the time since I first dreamed of it, I’ve seen so many other ways people have used the web to follow that same instinct. Game design has benefited greatly from this, and social media has certainly created community spaces for us to share local talent and culture. My focus now is to continue to explore the range of my skills, and find a way to apply them to support that impulse in others. Maybe I’ll make my own web-based game, as I’ve already enjoyed experimenting with Twine a little. It’s in the application and daily practice of those tools that I feel inspired to create, seeing what someone can do in the simplest way and with an eye for accessibility. A good website design is a lot like a blueprint, where you have measured twice, three times, and rebuilt the structure in your mind over and over until all the pieces fit as if they could never have any other purpose but that one alone.

Part of me wishes I could still go up those stairs to my Grandfather’s office, and show him my coursework, show him my planning documents for 8Bit Hops and Where To Next?, and see in his eyes that recognition of a shared philosophy. He used to love to quote ‘A Bag of Tools’ by R. L. Sharpe, and when he did, you felt like he was chiding you for your stumbling block, and never your stepping block. There was always a way to do it better, to work harder and improve, to really look at the idea in front of you and turn it into something more. I wish I could have shown him that I understand that.

So that’s me, on paper, experiences and all. I plan to keep building my skills, with the goal that I’ll be able to help make something really great someday. Every experience is an opportunity to learn, and one should (to quote a GBBO meme) go out on their best cake.