November 27, 2021
I have had some down-time over Thanksgiving and decided to update my web page. It was a shock to realize that other than some videos and a lot of shares of posts by others, I hadn’t posted anything personal since 2017. I had tried writing a very long and involved post about our trip to Nepal and Everest Base Camp in 2019, but I never made it out of the DRAFT stage. I was having a lot of computer problems then with the post freezing in process and everything being tedious and horribly slow. I got my new computer in early November and things are working again.
I started a new job in October this year. In April of 2020, the people I had worked for the past 6-1/2 years informed me we were going on un-paid furlough for 90-days because of Covid-19. At some point in the process, I realized that 90-days really meant forever, or at least a very long time, so I shot out some resumes and was offered a Project Manager position with a general contractor building a 20-story high-rise student housing project next to ASU in Tempe. Their PM had contracted Covid and was not coming back. We turned the project over for occupancy on the last day or two of July 2021.
It was mid-September when the guy that did the monthly project observations and draw reviews for the construction lender on the project reached out to me. He told me that he watched 40 or 50 projects being built at the same time ours was being built in the middle of the Covid pandemic, and our project was the best he witnessed. We hit all our dates, we opened right on time, and we had our act together. What he wanted to talk about was me taking over his work as he was sick of the travel and wanted to settle down at his place in Texas. It took some time for me to sift through all the details of what he was offering, and how much money I could make, but in the end, I accepted and am now covering El Paso, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and California doing job site progress observations and monthly draw reviews on about 30 projects under construction.
For the first time in my life when faced with this kind of situation money was not the driving force behind my decision. I am quite sure I could have made more money staying with the company I was with or switching to another general contractor. The driving factor in my decision was I wanted my life back. I will be 64 in December of this year, and I am trying to work until I am 66-1/2. Working for this contractor was very hard for me physically. I had to be at the job site every morning by 5 AM and I was on my feet and moving all day until I left between 3 and 4 PM. I did not take a vacation for over a year and worked my share of holidays and weekends. I played two games of golf in the entire time I worked there. I just didn’t want to do that unrelenting grind for another two and 1/2 years.
So here I go into the next phase of my life. Hopefully, it works out. Hopefully we can travel a little and sock some money away, so I don’t have to eat dog food when I am in my 80’s, and enjoy myself a little over the next couple years.
