As I’ve said before, I believe we could go through two or three different careers in a lifetime. My third is as a writer ( Find my first novel Dangerously Overcaffeinated on Amazon at https://a.co/d/0gpgp2Uf ). You can see more about me at https://www.dalethomas.com/
One of my first careers was in healthcare consulting. In the mid 1980’s, I worked on a hospital consulting job in San Diego for nearly three years. The major rub in managing engagements at the Big 8 (now Big 4) accounting firms was the travel. I lived in Pittsburgh for a year and never worked a day at a Price Waterhouse client, but moved to Cincinnati and had my first three Deloitte engagements in Pittsburgh. Lynn and I were dual-income, no kids, were new to town, and had few friends outside of business. We looked at our business travel as scouting out future places to live. To this day, neither of us has visited New York City on our own money. One way I survived was to consider every time I left town a vacation of sorts. San Diego was one of the few places I worked that was enlightening and refreshing. However, I never tried to buy a house there.
The great thing about Southern California was that I could work less hard than in our Cincinnati office. They were more French than Midwest; work to live, not live to work. That philosophy isn’t wrong, just different. I could fly from Cincinnati to San Diego, rent a car, drive to the client, and still beat the staff who drove 90 miles in heavy traffic down the I-5 from Orange County by 30 minutes.
Most of the staff from Orange County was single. Due to rush-hour traffic, both men and women had a friend in every city to spend time and have fun until the congestion eased. One night, for dinner, my lead consultant, his friend, her roommate, and I drove the I-5 to the San Ysidro Border Crossing in Tijuana and bought some insurance at a drive-through. We cut through town to Vía Rápida José Fimbres Moreno to pick up the Transpeninsular Highway. From there, we continued on to Playas de Rosarito and found El Nido. This was nearly forty years ago, so the beach has been built up and the cantinas all upgraded. It was a classic cantina complete with lobster, rice, and beans. I didn’t know that Pacific Ocean lobsters don’t have claws. They resemble large crayfish.
We loaded up the table with a pitcher of margaritas- I call them pitchers of liquid gold and a bucket of Coronas. Corona wasn’t sold in the Midwest at the time, much like in the past, Coors wasn’t sold east of the Mississippi River.
After a few margaritas, the conversation strayed away from what we were doing in the hospital to more personal talk. As I said, Rose was the lead consultant’s girlfriend in San Diego, and she’d brought along her roommate, a firefighter. I think her name was Amber. I mentioned that I lived in Cincinnati.
“I was in Cincinnati once,” Amber said, taking a sip.
“Really, where in Cincy?” I asked.
“Well not Cincinnati but close to it.”
“Close like Indianapolis?”
“Where?” Amber asked.
“You know where they have the Indy 500, the Indianapolis Colts, and the Indiana Pacers. The Pan Am Games are scheduled to be there soon.”
“Oh yeah, no but close.”
“Close like Chicago?” I asked.
“No, no, no, my family was on vacation in Butte, Montana.”
“Wow, just drive 24 hours, and you’re downtown Cincinnati,” my lead consultant, now my friend, muttered.
“Interesting,” I said.
Many of the people I met had never been out of California except for maybe a trip to Hawaii. I’m guessing times have changed but you never know. The whole scene reminded me of one of those posters you see in the old Spencer’s Gifts store at the mall. You’re standing on a California beach, and the Statue of Liberty is at the other end of the country with nothing in between.
Bad Coffee or Vodka Cranberry 