Remember that famous book that was designed to help people figure out what they are supposed to do in life? Well, I am truly fortunate – I never read the book but through a series of seemingly unrelated events I found my dream job. S and I had moved to New Orleans in 1995 – little did we know how much that move became pivotal in our lives. We were five years married at this point, S went to work with at Eskew and met N. I enrolled in a writer’s workshop at Tulane and met D.
After 11 months of agonizing over being here, S decided he needed to go back to California. I didn’t want to go. I was absolutely paralyzed in that feeling. But once he said he was going back with or without me, I decided home is where your heart is and my heart resided with him. So we went back. I had three paralyzing years – anxiety attacks and sadness that overwhelmed me – but I got through it.
In the meantime, D had left before me to move to SF for the first time. So when I got there we formed our own writer’s workshop and met out of my apartment with a few other writers we hooked up with. Then D went on a blind date with a woman he ended up marrying and having two children with. And J worked at RCM and she was looking for a freelancer (that would be me) to help edit quarterly letters that were sent to clients. So I started once a quarter going in and putting together the end of the quarter portfolio letters.
J was good friends with C. C worked in the Grassroots division of RCM, now DRCM since Dresdner bank had bought the financial management firm a few years before I got there. Grassroots was started by Craig Gordon, who also started Off the Record Research, a more significant evolution of the original idea – providing analysts and portfolio managers with nonbiased marketplace research. One day C came down to talk to J and said she’d like to know if I wanted to try my hand at doing a report. J was resistant, worried she might lose me to C.
It’s a long story how that got me to Off the Record – but needless to say, if you go back in time and connect the dots, the path seems clear, but at the time, it felt more like walking down blind alleys and not sure what was coming next. In hindsight, this job was made for me and I made my job – I started the media group at OTR and oh, what a difference to me.