The Decision is Made
“I think we should
move to Chicago,” she said.
I’m sure statements like this happen every day. People
decide to move, perhaps because of a boyfriend or girlfriend, maybe there’s a
job opportunity, or a specific college. Maybe there’s a sick parent that would
needs caring, and a devoted family member decides to uproot an entire family.
There are a myriad of reasons.
But generally, a decision like this comes down to one of
two reasons. 1) The family has lived here previously, and is moving back to
familiar territory. 2) There is some tremendous opportunity, typically related
to a job or educational institution, that only exists in one place, and the
time is now to strike before the opportunity is lost. This didn’t seem like either
of those.
“What?”
We had sort of been opening our horizons for a few
months. I was completing my Master’s degree in a highly coveted field, the
school my special-needs son was in wasn’t really meeting his needs, and while
we were comfortable in North Carolina, the reasons we had moved here had
somewhat evaporated.
We moved here in 2001 so that I could take over the
country’s fastest growing airline, Midway, which was based in Raleigh-Durham
International Airport. It was my dream job, even better than when I was a
manager at Chicago O’Hare (which, being a Chicago native, had always been on my
bucket list, and had been achieved a few years prior). But, 9/11 had ended
Midway, and with it my decade of work in airline management.
“I’m serious. I
think we need to move to Chicago when the school year ends.”
After a few agonizing months of unemployment, I had
scrapped for work, managing a call center at Adam and Eve, heading a team of
tax analysts (until those jobs were dutifully shipped off to Indonesia), helping
a few companies get off the ground by writing their business plans and helping
them figure out how to be profitable. But I hadn’t really found anything that
matched my skill sets and allowed me to really enjoy being a manager again.
The degree was going to change all that. I’m a communicator.
I’ve done radio, television, marketing, presentations; I can translate English
to techie and back. One of my best uses is explaining to programmers exactly
what the people who use the system want it to do, and then explaining back to
the stakeholders what the programmers are actually able to achieve.
“I can make that
happen, but I can’t promise it’s going to be easy. Are you sure?”
Let me give you an example. I love explaining to people
how big data is changing the world. In short, big data is like microbiology (or
nanobiology if you want to go all 21st Century) in reverse. You have
to completely change the way you think. I won’t bore you with all of the stuff
about how much information we create every day, and that one day’s worth of
information stored on CD’s would extend past the edges of the universe, because
that’s too much for the mind to grasp. But consider this: (source and thanks: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Monkey_typewriter_theory)
You’re familiar with the old question of having an
infinite number of monkeys, typing away on an infinite number of typewriters –
how long would it take to type out the complete works of Shakespeare?
Even with a gigantic population of monkeys (more than the
human population of Earth) typing at a fairly fast pace over a time period
that, for all intents and purposes on a human scale, is forever, the
probability of coming up with one work of Shakespeare is so minuscule as to be
zero in any practical sense.
On the other hand, if you have 4.7×10164,345 monkeys
(which is way more than the number of atoms in the universe, though still far
less than the number of possible games of chess; but just saying that it has
some theoretical basis), the probability to finish it within the first 100000
characters (of each typewriter) becomes 99%.
Read that again, I’ll wait. The probability to finish it
within the first 100000 characters (of each typewriter) becomes 99%.
So, as we approach an infinite amount of data, which
arguably, we are, the odds of finding the complete works of Shakespeare
approaches 100%, and fairly quickly. So, if you find Hamlet in the first
100,000 characters, that’s no longer an anomaly. So you have to sort of turn
your whole brain inside out when you start sifting through all that data to
figure out what *is* and *is not* considered to be something worthwhile or
unusual.
“Let’s do it. We’re
sort of been heading that way for the last 25 years anyway, haven’t we?”
Anyway, here’s why my wife’s proclamation was so unusual.
She’s from Nowhere, Louisiana. Please understand, I’m not one of those big city
snobs that looks down on people. I’ve fished with chicken livers in water so
muddy you can’t see an inch into it. I can use “y’all” in a sentence, and have
friends from places where when you hit “scan” on your FM radio, the numbers
just spin and spin, because there’s not a town of any size for miles and miles.
People are people, and I love them all.
But when I first took my beautiful young bride to
Chicago, she was literally shaking at the thought of being in such a large
city. Thankfully, Chicago is one of the most welcoming cities in the world –
basically a large collection of small towns, kept remarkably clean and
tree-lined with the calming waters of Lake Michigan within earshot (when it’s
not drowned out by the L). Every time we left, she had a list of things she
wanted to do next time. And considering we met in Austin, Texas (I’m not a fan
of Texas, although Austin *is* pretty awesome) I had always been very proud of
my hometown.
“The school we want
is there, your family is from there, you were *born* there, our son is going to
college there, and every time we’ve left, I’ve wanted to go back, so let’s just
head up there and stay this time.”
Well, it’s hard to argue with logic like that. When
someone who hates the cold and likes living in the country says she’s ready to
move to Rogers Park, right in the city – you move Heaven and earth to make it
happen.
Surely with such logic and will, the elements will align
and make the transition easy, right? Right?
