About Me
So who am I? Well if you've come to this page then you must have some interest in who I am. So, be prepared because below is just a bunch of ramblings about my life. Keep in mind that this was really just an exercise for myself, but feel free to read it. And don't come whining to me about grammar, spelling, punctuation etc. I DON'T CARE!
My name is Scott and I live in Oklahoma. I am 37 years old as of this update (May 2006).
I've got a wife, 3 kids and a beagle that doesn't look like a beagle.(She's mainly black which is rare).
I work for a very big car rental company and I setup and configure their web servers.
I love music, all kinds. While in the car I primarily listen to sports radio.
I love sports but I'm not the type to just sit in front of the TV for hours watching everything sports. The exceptions to this though are OU and Dallas Cowboys football. I love going to baseball games. I usually go see the Texas Rangers about once a year but haven't in the last few. I usually also always go to a couple of local minor-league games. In addition to not watching sports, I dont play sports. So its odd for me to say I'm a sports lover, but I am. The whole idea of competition is animal and I love it. Why dont I play any sports? I'm REALLY REALLY bad about worrying what people think about me. I want to be the best. If no one sees me play then they'll never know for sure that I'm not the best. And of course I'm not, I know that already. But I dont want to screw up or look silly in front of anyone. I guess I like having the image of the 15 year old all around athlete that I once was. If I play any sports as an adult I'll shatter that image.
I grew up in Bartlesville, Ok. Went to Bartlesville High School. In elementary school up through middle school I was really active in sports. I played baseball, soccer and ran cross country. I was pretty good at all these and could run really fast and my head began to swell. I thought I would make a great wide receiver so in 9th grade I stopped playing all other sports and started playing football. I SUCKED! I was skinny and weighed next to nothing and I got slammed around pretty good. After football season was over I never got back into sports. I really regret it. I loved soccer and they had just started a soccer team at the high school. People that had never played before were making the team. I could have made the team. Instead I just did nothing. Well, nothing but band.
I started playing the trumpet in the 5th grade and even took private lessons. By about the 8th grade I started to hate it and I wasn't doing too well. I really wanted to quit but my parents wouldn't let me. By the time I was a senior I was really close to being last chair. Who came up with something like that anyway, chairs? Anyone can walk into a room, see where your sitting and instantly know that you are the worst. Of all the people that do what you do in the band, no one is worse than you. Thats terrible. Luckily I never made it all the way down to last chair. There were always a few people worse than me.
In 11th grade I got a job working at Skaggs Alpha Beta as a sacker. I stuck groceries in sacks and carried them out to peoples cars. I worked there during high school and the first few summers of college. While the work wasn't much fun, I made a lot of friends; people I wouldn't have socialized with otherwise. There were some pretty popular people from high school that worked there, and some pretty trashy people. Once you tie your apron on and haul groceries around you're all the same. I went back there about a year ago and there was some guy still working there that I had worked with in high school. He was a cashier then and looked like he was in some sort of manager role now. But that gap in between was like 10 years or something. I cant imagine working in the same grocery store for 10 years.
In 1987 I graduated from high school and moved to Edmond, Oklahoma to begin college at Oklahoma Christian College (now Oklahoma Christian University). In high school I was always pretty good at math and liked the accounting class that I had, so I thought accounting would be a fun major. Well, for a year or so it was, then it really got boring and I started to HATE it. But, along the way I was required to take an intro computer class. It was so much fun. I learned this really cool program called Lotus 1-2-3 and I had fun in the computer lab one day making some graphs on the dot-matrix printer. Now at this point you may start to worry that I'm a real loser. Dont fret, Lotus 1-2-3 hadn't consumed my life, it was just something I did for 20 minutes or so that one day, but I just thought it was fun to play with. And I see this as being the turning point in my college career. Still a few semesters after the graph-a-thon I remained an accounting major. Enter cost accounting. It was a beast. It tore me limb from limb. I received F's on my first two tests. It was at this point I started thinking that accounting wasn't for me. And I remembered the computer stuff and thought I really liked it a lot. I quickly dropped cost accounting and continued the semester. After that semester was over I switched my major to Computer Information Systems. It was a precursor to Management Information Systems but it was considered part of the College of Business and not the College of Science. So, I still had to take a bunch of business related classes like marketing, financial management etc. But I also got to take some programming classes and computer theory and many other riveting subjects.
It was around this time that I started dating Deborah Knowles. We had met about a year earlier and had become best friends. Eventually we got married but I dont want to get too far ahead of my story. Anyway, college continued and my grades started to improve. I attribute alot of this to being in a major that I liked and Deborah. She was a good girl and studied a lot and if I wanted to be with her well then I had to be sitting in the library. So, what else is there to do in there besides study? So thats what I did.
The whole changing majors thing had put me a semester behind at school so I had to go an extra semester. During this time I lived off campus. The previous 4 years I had lived in on-campus apartments and dorm rooms. I was now living with 2 guys I barley knew. I had been in some classes with one of them but the other I had never met. Their 3rd roommate was a pretty good friend of mine and he had just graduated and gotten a job in Arkansas. Right after I moved in with them I got a job working nights at a credit union as a computer operator. This was awesome, I wasn't even out of school yet and I had a computer related job. I had hit the big time, it was incredible. Well, working nights and then having an 8:00am class really sucks, let me tell you. But I suffered through it.
So, in December of 1991 I graduated with my B.S. in Computer Information Systems. I was still a huge idiot at this time. While all my classmates were hitting the bricks looking for jobs, I was sending out the occasional resume. I had no idea how to look for a job and because I had steady income from my nightime gig, I wasn't real fired up to find one. My girlfriend lived close and why in the world would I want to move away from her. So I was also limiting my looking to the Oklahoma City area. Well eventually the credit union hired me full-time as a computer programmer so the problem was solved. Of course I had no idea what kind of money people were making and I was just thrilled to be working full-time. I now know that I screwed myself for working for so little, and for so long. I worked there until 1996.
Well, back to Deborah. We got married in October, 1992. I was working at the credit union, she was substitute teaching in Edmond. We could pay our bills and everything was fine. We were happy. In December 1994 along came Tanner. We were living in a duplex in Edmond and Deborah had stopped working at the Edmond Schools and started babysitting out of our home, so having our own baby didn't present any problems. No one had to quit work or anything. Right after Tanners 1st birthday Deborah decided that our duplex was a little too small for all the kids she was keeping so we started renting a house. And a really crappy house at that. Deborah kept babysitting and I kept working at the credit union and all was well. We weren't making tons of money but we always had enough to pay our bills. Started putting some things on credit cards as everyone does, which I dont recommend. After living in this house for about a year we decided to buy it. The folks that were renting it to us didn't really plan to rent it out in the first place, but they had taken a job in another city and were having trouble selling the house. Anyway, our year lease was up and we were offered the opportunity to buy it, or move out. I didn't want to move again so I bought it. Got it for a decent price. But I will say that it is now about 100 times the house it was when we moved in. We've done tons to improve it.
Around October of 1996 I was getting restless at the Credit Union. It was one of those "I work my tail off and for what?" kind of deals. They weren't paying me like I felt I should be paid and I went looking elsewhere. This time I actually worked a little harder to try and find a job. I contacted a few employment services, went on 3 different interviews in a short amount of time, and whatdoyaknow, I was offered ALL 3 JOBS! What are the odds. I ended up not taking the highest paying job, but rather one at Oklahoma Christian University. Yep, back at the old Alma Matter.
There was a couple in Edmond that Deborah babysat for for about a year, and the husband had since taken a job as head of Information Services at Oklahoma Christian. He needed a good computer programmer to help them implement this big computer system and write some custom programs for it. It was all supposed to be Windows and Oracle and C programming. Well, what I didn't know when I started working there was, they hadn't actually bought the system yet. In fact, they were still looking at different computer systems and trying to decide which to buy. So, during this process, what was I supposed to do? Well, I had developed a web site while working at the Credit Union and had become very familiar with making web sites, and programming for the web. So, I was now in charge of the Oklahoma Christian University web site. HOLY COW! There were a few students that had been working on it but some had left school. So, me and primarily one other guy tackled the job of keeping the web site up and going. But I'm no artist. I took very little interest in how the web site looked. Dont get me wrong, I wanted it to look nice, but I just knew that I wasn't the one who could do this. My interests were in other areas of the web site, things like Guestbooks, sending mail out from the web site, making the site dynamic so you could make one change and it would be reflected throughout the site. Anyway, in addition to the site, I was in charge of the server that it was running on. So I became familiar with setting up and performance-tuning a high-volume web site.
One day in January or February of 1998 I get a call from a guy saying he is a friend of the guy that had hired me to work at OC. (This guy had since quit and gone on to bigger and better things so he wasnt my boss anymore). This big car rental company that he worked for had implemented a web site a few years ago and it was really starting to take off. They needed a full-time employee to manage the day-to-day operations of the server. Who better than me they thought. I wasn't even looking for a job and at first wasn't really even interested. I thought about it and they told me what the pay was, and then they offered it to me. Seemed like a good deal so I jumped on it. And this is the job I have today.
While working at OC we downsized to only 1 car. OC is close to our house, and Deborah was home with a housefull of kids all day. Why did we need 2 cars. But my new job was pretty far away, and Deborah had taken a job two days a week teaching at our church preschool. So, I bought a car. 1994 Isuzu Rodeo. Was really more than I wanted to pay, but I got suckered into it. And you know who suckered me into it. Me. I really liked Rodeos at the time and I saw this one at the upper limits of my price range and I bought it. Just had to have an SUV. Oh well, I still have it and it runs pretty good. Anyway, in less than a month I had a new child, a new job and a new (to me) car.
Well thats all a bunch of boring information but it was interesting for me to write it. At present all my credit cards and my rodeo are paid off. I'm slowly working on paying off our van, and then the second mortgage. But I also need to move into a new house (this one is way too small) so I dont know what the most cost effective thing is to do right now.
10-20-2003: Update. My van is paid off and I now live in a brand spankin' new house. Of course that doesn't help my debt situation any, but it helps my sanity. We were cramped in that little house we used to live in. We gained a little over 600 square feet in moving. Now we have room to move around.
5-27-2008: Another update. These updates seem to be of the financial nature, and unfortunately this one is actually negative, not positive. The "large car rental company", Hertz, that I had been working for decided to outsource all of their information technology to IBM. I interviewed with IBM and was offered a position, and it was for a substantial amount of money. But something about that whole thing didn't feel right to me. I could see that the scope of my work was going to become more and more limited and over time my skill set would be decreasing. I would be an expert in one field, and that would be about all I know. So, I got a new job, and in a few years I think it will be awesome financially. But my starting salary was quite a step backwards from the level I was at. And about a year and a half ago we had to buy a new van, which equates to a car payment. But one car payment wasn't that big of a deal...back when I was making all my sweet cash. But now I'm not. And two weeks ago I had to buy a new (to me) car for myself. My Rodeo basically just died and I didn't think throwing money at a 14 year old car was smart. So now I find myself with less salary, and 2 car payments. Not the situation I was hoping to be in, especially while approaching the big 4-0. Oh well, I still have enough to pay the bills and get Taco Bell occasionally. We'll be ok.
7-24-2012: Even another update. And again financial. Both cars paid off .In fact even a 3rd car paid off. So no car payments again. What a good feeling. I just hope these cars last awhile, with one starting college next year, and finding out that I probably won't be getting a bonus this year, I really don't want to get back into a situation of having a car payment. But I do have a storm shelter payment. We put in a storm shelter a month ago, before I knew about the no bonus thing, and I took a loan out on it. Good times.
My name is Scott and I live in Oklahoma. I am 37 years old as of this update (May 2006).
I've got a wife, 3 kids and a beagle that doesn't look like a beagle.(She's mainly black which is rare).
I work for a very big car rental company and I setup and configure their web servers.
I love music, all kinds. While in the car I primarily listen to sports radio.
I love sports but I'm not the type to just sit in front of the TV for hours watching everything sports. The exceptions to this though are OU and Dallas Cowboys football. I love going to baseball games. I usually go see the Texas Rangers about once a year but haven't in the last few. I usually also always go to a couple of local minor-league games. In addition to not watching sports, I dont play sports. So its odd for me to say I'm a sports lover, but I am. The whole idea of competition is animal and I love it. Why dont I play any sports? I'm REALLY REALLY bad about worrying what people think about me. I want to be the best. If no one sees me play then they'll never know for sure that I'm not the best. And of course I'm not, I know that already. But I dont want to screw up or look silly in front of anyone. I guess I like having the image of the 15 year old all around athlete that I once was. If I play any sports as an adult I'll shatter that image.
I grew up in Bartlesville, Ok. Went to Bartlesville High School. In elementary school up through middle school I was really active in sports. I played baseball, soccer and ran cross country. I was pretty good at all these and could run really fast and my head began to swell. I thought I would make a great wide receiver so in 9th grade I stopped playing all other sports and started playing football. I SUCKED! I was skinny and weighed next to nothing and I got slammed around pretty good. After football season was over I never got back into sports. I really regret it. I loved soccer and they had just started a soccer team at the high school. People that had never played before were making the team. I could have made the team. Instead I just did nothing. Well, nothing but band.
I started playing the trumpet in the 5th grade and even took private lessons. By about the 8th grade I started to hate it and I wasn't doing too well. I really wanted to quit but my parents wouldn't let me. By the time I was a senior I was really close to being last chair. Who came up with something like that anyway, chairs? Anyone can walk into a room, see where your sitting and instantly know that you are the worst. Of all the people that do what you do in the band, no one is worse than you. Thats terrible. Luckily I never made it all the way down to last chair. There were always a few people worse than me.
In 11th grade I got a job working at Skaggs Alpha Beta as a sacker. I stuck groceries in sacks and carried them out to peoples cars. I worked there during high school and the first few summers of college. While the work wasn't much fun, I made a lot of friends; people I wouldn't have socialized with otherwise. There were some pretty popular people from high school that worked there, and some pretty trashy people. Once you tie your apron on and haul groceries around you're all the same. I went back there about a year ago and there was some guy still working there that I had worked with in high school. He was a cashier then and looked like he was in some sort of manager role now. But that gap in between was like 10 years or something. I cant imagine working in the same grocery store for 10 years.
In 1987 I graduated from high school and moved to Edmond, Oklahoma to begin college at Oklahoma Christian College (now Oklahoma Christian University). In high school I was always pretty good at math and liked the accounting class that I had, so I thought accounting would be a fun major. Well, for a year or so it was, then it really got boring and I started to HATE it. But, along the way I was required to take an intro computer class. It was so much fun. I learned this really cool program called Lotus 1-2-3 and I had fun in the computer lab one day making some graphs on the dot-matrix printer. Now at this point you may start to worry that I'm a real loser. Dont fret, Lotus 1-2-3 hadn't consumed my life, it was just something I did for 20 minutes or so that one day, but I just thought it was fun to play with. And I see this as being the turning point in my college career. Still a few semesters after the graph-a-thon I remained an accounting major. Enter cost accounting. It was a beast. It tore me limb from limb. I received F's on my first two tests. It was at this point I started thinking that accounting wasn't for me. And I remembered the computer stuff and thought I really liked it a lot. I quickly dropped cost accounting and continued the semester. After that semester was over I switched my major to Computer Information Systems. It was a precursor to Management Information Systems but it was considered part of the College of Business and not the College of Science. So, I still had to take a bunch of business related classes like marketing, financial management etc. But I also got to take some programming classes and computer theory and many other riveting subjects.
It was around this time that I started dating Deborah Knowles. We had met about a year earlier and had become best friends. Eventually we got married but I dont want to get too far ahead of my story. Anyway, college continued and my grades started to improve. I attribute alot of this to being in a major that I liked and Deborah. She was a good girl and studied a lot and if I wanted to be with her well then I had to be sitting in the library. So, what else is there to do in there besides study? So thats what I did.
The whole changing majors thing had put me a semester behind at school so I had to go an extra semester. During this time I lived off campus. The previous 4 years I had lived in on-campus apartments and dorm rooms. I was now living with 2 guys I barley knew. I had been in some classes with one of them but the other I had never met. Their 3rd roommate was a pretty good friend of mine and he had just graduated and gotten a job in Arkansas. Right after I moved in with them I got a job working nights at a credit union as a computer operator. This was awesome, I wasn't even out of school yet and I had a computer related job. I had hit the big time, it was incredible. Well, working nights and then having an 8:00am class really sucks, let me tell you. But I suffered through it.
So, in December of 1991 I graduated with my B.S. in Computer Information Systems. I was still a huge idiot at this time. While all my classmates were hitting the bricks looking for jobs, I was sending out the occasional resume. I had no idea how to look for a job and because I had steady income from my nightime gig, I wasn't real fired up to find one. My girlfriend lived close and why in the world would I want to move away from her. So I was also limiting my looking to the Oklahoma City area. Well eventually the credit union hired me full-time as a computer programmer so the problem was solved. Of course I had no idea what kind of money people were making and I was just thrilled to be working full-time. I now know that I screwed myself for working for so little, and for so long. I worked there until 1996.
Well, back to Deborah. We got married in October, 1992. I was working at the credit union, she was substitute teaching in Edmond. We could pay our bills and everything was fine. We were happy. In December 1994 along came Tanner. We were living in a duplex in Edmond and Deborah had stopped working at the Edmond Schools and started babysitting out of our home, so having our own baby didn't present any problems. No one had to quit work or anything. Right after Tanners 1st birthday Deborah decided that our duplex was a little too small for all the kids she was keeping so we started renting a house. And a really crappy house at that. Deborah kept babysitting and I kept working at the credit union and all was well. We weren't making tons of money but we always had enough to pay our bills. Started putting some things on credit cards as everyone does, which I dont recommend. After living in this house for about a year we decided to buy it. The folks that were renting it to us didn't really plan to rent it out in the first place, but they had taken a job in another city and were having trouble selling the house. Anyway, our year lease was up and we were offered the opportunity to buy it, or move out. I didn't want to move again so I bought it. Got it for a decent price. But I will say that it is now about 100 times the house it was when we moved in. We've done tons to improve it.
Around October of 1996 I was getting restless at the Credit Union. It was one of those "I work my tail off and for what?" kind of deals. They weren't paying me like I felt I should be paid and I went looking elsewhere. This time I actually worked a little harder to try and find a job. I contacted a few employment services, went on 3 different interviews in a short amount of time, and whatdoyaknow, I was offered ALL 3 JOBS! What are the odds. I ended up not taking the highest paying job, but rather one at Oklahoma Christian University. Yep, back at the old Alma Matter.
There was a couple in Edmond that Deborah babysat for for about a year, and the husband had since taken a job as head of Information Services at Oklahoma Christian. He needed a good computer programmer to help them implement this big computer system and write some custom programs for it. It was all supposed to be Windows and Oracle and C programming. Well, what I didn't know when I started working there was, they hadn't actually bought the system yet. In fact, they were still looking at different computer systems and trying to decide which to buy. So, during this process, what was I supposed to do? Well, I had developed a web site while working at the Credit Union and had become very familiar with making web sites, and programming for the web. So, I was now in charge of the Oklahoma Christian University web site. HOLY COW! There were a few students that had been working on it but some had left school. So, me and primarily one other guy tackled the job of keeping the web site up and going. But I'm no artist. I took very little interest in how the web site looked. Dont get me wrong, I wanted it to look nice, but I just knew that I wasn't the one who could do this. My interests were in other areas of the web site, things like Guestbooks, sending mail out from the web site, making the site dynamic so you could make one change and it would be reflected throughout the site. Anyway, in addition to the site, I was in charge of the server that it was running on. So I became familiar with setting up and performance-tuning a high-volume web site.
One day in January or February of 1998 I get a call from a guy saying he is a friend of the guy that had hired me to work at OC. (This guy had since quit and gone on to bigger and better things so he wasnt my boss anymore). This big car rental company that he worked for had implemented a web site a few years ago and it was really starting to take off. They needed a full-time employee to manage the day-to-day operations of the server. Who better than me they thought. I wasn't even looking for a job and at first wasn't really even interested. I thought about it and they told me what the pay was, and then they offered it to me. Seemed like a good deal so I jumped on it. And this is the job I have today.
While working at OC we downsized to only 1 car. OC is close to our house, and Deborah was home with a housefull of kids all day. Why did we need 2 cars. But my new job was pretty far away, and Deborah had taken a job two days a week teaching at our church preschool. So, I bought a car. 1994 Isuzu Rodeo. Was really more than I wanted to pay, but I got suckered into it. And you know who suckered me into it. Me. I really liked Rodeos at the time and I saw this one at the upper limits of my price range and I bought it. Just had to have an SUV. Oh well, I still have it and it runs pretty good. Anyway, in less than a month I had a new child, a new job and a new (to me) car.
Well thats all a bunch of boring information but it was interesting for me to write it. At present all my credit cards and my rodeo are paid off. I'm slowly working on paying off our van, and then the second mortgage. But I also need to move into a new house (this one is way too small) so I dont know what the most cost effective thing is to do right now.
10-20-2003: Update. My van is paid off and I now live in a brand spankin' new house. Of course that doesn't help my debt situation any, but it helps my sanity. We were cramped in that little house we used to live in. We gained a little over 600 square feet in moving. Now we have room to move around.
5-27-2008: Another update. These updates seem to be of the financial nature, and unfortunately this one is actually negative, not positive. The "large car rental company", Hertz, that I had been working for decided to outsource all of their information technology to IBM. I interviewed with IBM and was offered a position, and it was for a substantial amount of money. But something about that whole thing didn't feel right to me. I could see that the scope of my work was going to become more and more limited and over time my skill set would be decreasing. I would be an expert in one field, and that would be about all I know. So, I got a new job, and in a few years I think it will be awesome financially. But my starting salary was quite a step backwards from the level I was at. And about a year and a half ago we had to buy a new van, which equates to a car payment. But one car payment wasn't that big of a deal...back when I was making all my sweet cash. But now I'm not. And two weeks ago I had to buy a new (to me) car for myself. My Rodeo basically just died and I didn't think throwing money at a 14 year old car was smart. So now I find myself with less salary, and 2 car payments. Not the situation I was hoping to be in, especially while approaching the big 4-0. Oh well, I still have enough to pay the bills and get Taco Bell occasionally. We'll be ok.
7-24-2012: Even another update. And again financial. Both cars paid off .In fact even a 3rd car paid off. So no car payments again. What a good feeling. I just hope these cars last awhile, with one starting college next year, and finding out that I probably won't be getting a bonus this year, I really don't want to get back into a situation of having a car payment. But I do have a storm shelter payment. We put in a storm shelter a month ago, before I knew about the no bonus thing, and I took a loan out on it. Good times.