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Gettin' barenaked |
The barenakedfamily backstage.
It started in San Antonio, Texas. Greg and Jenn met on July 15, 1991 while working at a local auto specialty shop. We were instantly inseparable. It was love at first sight, but due to both of us being newly split from previous long terms, we moved very slowly and became best of friends. For years we laughed about the ‘only three days’ we were apart when Jenn took off in the first month of knowing each other to a pre-planned trip to Del Rio. We spent every day and moment together. We worked together, played together, learned together, and soon lived together.
We moved the shop together. Greg managed the shop and Jenn handled advertising and promotions. The dream became to open a similar shop in Austin, Texas with the owners backing. During our first year together a friend flew us to Los Angeles, California to drive his truck and stuff back to San Antonio. We camped and drove for ten days ~ Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Ruidoso, Carlsbad, and everything we could catch in between. We told everyone we were married in Vegas on April 10 to get ‘em off our preg-o backs. We actually married in a feed store in Cibolo, TX. on June 13, 1992. We honeymooned in Austin and watched the sunset over Lake Travis at the Oasis drinking free water and eating free chips and salsa ~ we tipped what we had. Thanks Oasis!
During this first year, we were living in a travel trailer with our cats and some crazy neighbors. After about a year working at the shop, the owner quit showing up and making payroll. We shut the shop down and moved to Austin with our travel trailer and $400. The summer of 1992 in Austin was very hot, financially challenging, and so much fun ~ our life was simple and sooo ghetto fabulous! We rationed our peanut butter and Ramen and almost every day we swam for free below the Zilker Springs Dam.
Greg did maintenance at the trailer park and began other odd temporary jobs using his electronics education. Jenn worked through her pregnancy in a trailer without shade and a flaky, leaky air conditioner. When the baby supplies started filing in it became obvious the trailer had to go. We began searching for apartments in a college town in August. August is fall, college is starting, NO apartments or rentals anywhere available and baby’s due. We started knocking on doors of homes near the airport that were for sale begging for a rental. During this same time Greg was working as a temp on the manufacturing line for a little known PC company named Dell.
The temp job got him an interview for a permanent job manning technical support lines. The first interview was horrible and Greg was not selected for the job. Fortunately they called back and scheduled a second interview. The home search also improved ~ After knocking and talking to about 100 homeowners, one finally bit ~ we’ll sell you the house for the cost you can rent it, got a job? Of course, we just started with Dell. Afterburners on!
Two interviews later, we did get the job. The job started August 24, 1992. Jenn’s labor was induced two weeks overdue on September 4. Austin Gregory is born some 30 hours later on September 5 and goes home to the trailer for just one night. The house closes on September 6 on the same day Austin gets severe jaundice and is admitted to the ICU. The doctors recommend a blood transfusion that we deny and he started his weeklong stay in the ICU under lamps. During the 24/7 we’re at the hospital, Greg takes time to move the trailer from the park to the backyard of our new house (built in 1955 and now in crack alley). We also moved furniture in from a dead guys house that the sellers realtor knew. Austin recovers just fine. It’s a wonderful life. Seriously, we were happy to come ‘home’ and learned to stay away from the front windows.
Greg’s career took off with Dell’s unprecedented success. By 1994 he had a stack of satisfied customer letters received by Michael Dell, signed by Michael himself with a personal note of thanks, and forwarded through management to Greg. Good stuff. This work ethic earned Greg a coveted spot as a Level II technician which is basically the phone techs, tech. During this time he helped with the creation of the Value Line Technical Support Team, Multimedia Technical Support Team, and Portables Technical Support Team. He also developed and presented numerous specialty-training courses for the teams on technologies such as modem communications, Multimedia (CD/Video/Audio), and portable systems technology (power management, battery, and LCD).
Kesley Jenna was born February 6, 1995 and Mitty Samantha (Sunny) on March 6, 1996. Jenn was very busy ~ raising babies, going to school, working various part time jobs, and supporting a career freak husband. Greg would be sent away on biz trips, you know ~ taking one for the team, glad to be selected, career stuff.
We would go to company picnics together as a family and company parties as a couple. Dell’s Christmas party in 1994 changed us. Michael and Susan Dell stood on the podium thanking the employees for coming and a great year and a toast and all that comes with being a CEO at a party for employees and their one guest. They stood up there and did what they wanted to do, as a CEO and wife should. They were up there with their three children in front of the company they built from the ground up. They truly inspired us. They showed us that they worked with the company, for their family.
The job was great and our home was cool. We had most of the stuff we wanted, hand – me – down furniture from a dead guys house, and everything we needed. The bills were getting paid on time. We were mostly out of debt and able to save and invest. In February of ’96 when Jenn was eight months pregnant with Sunny, the car she was driving was rear ended and totaled. Jenn was in labor for a month with two other babies at home. We decided to take paternal leave ~ unpaid daddy leave for three months. Sunny was born healthy and Jenn was fine. During this time off we put our energy into our dream ~ a family business. Something that would put us all working together, where the kids wouldn’t be in the way, but actually be an integral part of the business. We started a late night childcare business that attracted restaurant and bar employees, mostly single moms, mostly difficult to work with. It was doing well but we weren’t. After three months of leave, we decided Greg should go back to Dell. Within a month of returning, he was interviewed and selected to move from tech support to Portables Engineering Development. A career dream come true.
Greg dove into this part of his career and rarely came up for air. His first project was being solely responsible for the software installed in the largest portable project to date ~ the Latitude XpiCD. He may not have achieved launch had he agreed that it takes a large team to accomplish less than half the work (XpiCD had 14 driver disks ~ an all time record for Dell). He also received awards and accolades for his engineering role in winning the Proctor and Gamble account for Dell. He so impressed his management team that he received a perfect score on his review that led to the opportunity to start and develop the Inspiron Software Engineering Team from scratch. During this time he recognized Dell desperately needed an engineering team in Redmond, Washington at Microsoft and started lobbying hard in 1996 to be relocated there.
Things were good. Family was becoming more of a priority. Jenn was working at jobs or at home when she wanted. When Inspiron was launched in Europe in October 1997, Greg arranged for Jenn to go with him to Europe for business and vacation. When Inspiron was racing to be the first Portable system with DVD to market and then broke, Greg and Jenn negotiated for our family to be sent to San Jose together to fix the problem. Our family enjoyed San Jose, we fixed the problems, and Inspiron was first to market with DVD. When Inspiron wanted to send only Greg to Malaysia for an extended business trip, he declined the ‘opportunity’ to be with his family and seemed to be even more respected for his family values. We were truly learning how to work with the company, for family.
By 1998, we signed a contract on a house we hunted out near Lake Travis in a great community called Lago Vista. The crack alley house sold, twice. Both buyers backed out. So we rented crack alley, moved into the Lago house by renting it for months prior to actually closing on it. We thought we’d be in Lago for thirty plus years. Fate immediately showed us a different plan.
First, Mom let us know that she was selling the family farm in San Antonio ~ do we wanna do something with it? We built a really cool business plan for "Dit -n- Bo’s" (Ditty is Grandma, Bo is Grandpa ~ the founders of the land in our family). It was designed to be a family music venue with live music, bbq, bonfires, camping, cabins, petting zoo, small water park, and an off road carting track. It was sounding great until we realized that our ideas were too different from Mom’s and she was ultimately responsible for its development to this point and emotionally tied to it. Good thing, she’s still running it and loving it as of six years later.
Second fate Lago thing ~ Remember how we were renting Lago before closing on it? After nearly six months of renting, we closed on the Lago house on a Friday. On the following Monday after two years of lobbying with Dell for relocation to Microsoft and losing hope, the requisitions opened up and Greg was offered to hire and manage four others starting the first and only Dell Engineering Team at Microsoft. Hello. Fer sure! Dude ~ we got a Dell!
So we relocated from Lago Vista, Texas to Redmond, Washington in October 1998. We rented the Lago house sure that we would return eventually. After all, Texas is home and we’re spending thirty years in Lago, gonna raise the kids and all here, right? Bzzzz. Seattle rocks! Even more so because after the relocation all the requisitions dried up with the economy and Greg was left alone for a year and a half before we grew the Dell team in Redmond! We bought our third house in Issaquah, Washington. It was easily the coolest house we have lived in ~ built in 1900 in historic downtown Issaquah, two blocks off Front Street, and affordable for us at just under $200k (cheap for the area at the time). 1300 square feet, one real bedroom, one bathroom, and a converted attic with two separate areas (bedrooms?!?) for the kids. It sat on a 3200 square foot lot and had a very cool furnace cellar and woodstove for heating. Did everyone know that most Northwest homes don’t have air conditioning, at all! Strange for Texans. This house convinced us that we were definitely city dwellers, no more country or remote living for us.
Microsoft itself was family friendly and had free grape juice and sodas and awesome cafeterias and latte bars and parks and fountains ~ it is literally called ‘a campus’ ~ you could even bring your pets to work! The family was consistently at the office together, working, doing lunch, picking up, dropping off, and enjoying ‘the campus’. During this time we were truly family pimpin’ the Dell business trips as we negotiated cross-country RV trips combining business and vacation. Seattle to Austin and back ~ took nearly a month each time and expenses were completely paid for by Dell. Dell came out ahead because it cost less than air, hotel, and rental car for one. Greg had enough vacation to cover the travel and touring time, and would work from the cell and portable on the road anyway. Plus being alone in Redmond afforded Greg the opportunity to work at home and pseudo employ the family as a Dell team ~ we accomplished more in that year and a half than we had ever accomplished before.
The confidence Greg found from his family brought many wins to Dell at Microsoft. Greg played an integral role in replacing Compaq systems with Dell systems as Bill Gates frame for his presentation at Comdex ~ the largest and most prominent computer show in the world. He helped the Dell server team through persistent onsite support to win the contract for the sea of servers required to run MSN.com. He infiltrated Microsoft’s Executive Briefing Center and Joint Development Program to bring Dell systems prominence where there were arrays of the other guys boxes. He integrated Dell systems into the test and engineering labs that were over run with competitors systems. He arranged for Dell systems to be personally delivered to Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer (CEO), and numerous other Microsoft executives. He built a Dell factory server on campus that could duplicate Dell issues instantly. He walked into Microsoft offices the same day Dell problems presented themselves. He hand carried ‘gold’ code straight to Fed-Ex significantly decreasing Dell’s test cycles. Most importantly he hosted Dell executives that were visiting to come home and be with his family ~ the most joy came when one of them sat on the floor with the kids and just played like a child after Jenn’s homemade Alaskan Salmon dinner.
During this time in Redmond Greg met Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer (MS CEO), Al Gore, and played golf with Dave Cutler (Father of NT). We all met many Dell and Microsoft executives and ate lunch with a 24 year old that shopped for helicopters and we also built fun relationships with the lunch ladies and janitors.
Greg’s family was always with him. People at Microsoft knew his kids and Jenn by name. Microsoft and Dell people knew they weren’t going to get Greg without his family and this was good. Then the Dell team at Microsoft grew.
We only hired seven more people at its peak when Greg was still there. We were suddenly a team looking at each other trying to figure out what we were doing and they were doing and who was doing what and who was doing more and who was doing less and when they are coming and when they are going and who was in their office and who wasn’t... We were all cool with each other; it was just a whole new dynamic. It’s impossible to explain, but the Dell team was not Greg’s family anymore, it was a team that had a career as their top priority. Reviews. Appraisals. Reports. Advice. Criticism. Competition. The beginning of the end of a career ~ the realization that the best job in the world is poo without family.
Greg realized there was no career that could get better. In his mind he reached the top. He didn’t want to climb the ladder any higher. He saw the top. It was good, but not good enough for his family. 'WE' (ie: Greg) had much material to 'lose' ~ thousands of unvested stock options, an income well into the six figures, prominence, prestige, power, a career unmatched ~ a houseful of stuff, cars, investments, rental homes, furniture, paid vacations, savings... However, we were losing our family time together, once again.
Jenn had always encouraged Greg to let go. To just be family. To drop everything and do what we want regardless of the status or money ~ to just be family. She reminded Greg that we didn’t need stuff to be happy. That we could always swim for free below the Zilker Springs Dam.
Kalaloch (clay-lock) ~ a campground on the Pacific NW
coast. Greg’s mind wandered: If I won the lottery, if money were no object,
I would buy lots of stuff. Eventually I would have free time that I wasn’t
using to shop. What would I do? What would I do with my free time? Right now. If
I had everything I wanted, what would I do with my free time right now?
I’d travel the country in a bus and spend all my time
with my family ~ living, playing, learning, and working together. Jeez. I
don’t need a lot of money to do that!?!
Welcome to barenakedfamily.com
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Gettin' barenaked |