[buzzy]

Fresh out of college, I was an engineer for Grumman Aerospace Corp. when we were landing astronauts on the moon. Very exciting, and I was working with really brilliant people. Grumman was a great company to work for, with a great reputation for its Naval aircraft. But, pure engineering was a volatile business, so I migrated over to information technology. Fast forward 24 years, and I had to leave during the aerospace slump in the early nineties.

I spent three years doing IT contract work inside the Washington DC Beltway. Neat assignments for the FAA and Dept of Defense, but not organizations that I would call well-run.

Moved to Florida, and got a good IT position at Mutual of America, a 3rd party pension management company. I discovered the inner workings of all sorts of pension products. This was a company that treated its customers with care and respect, and that culture trickled down to employee relations and civic duty. I was once chatting with a woman on an airplane, and found that my company had been paying her monthly retirement checks for years. She was so happy to meet someone from the company that she trusted with her financial well-being. That made me feel very good. I worked there for 12 years, and retired in 2008.