I am writing my story to recapitulate some of the events in my life that led me to a fortunate situation I am in today and to find women who seek (or have already found) the greater happiness, success and realization of their power.
Having mentioned words like happiness, bliss and success, I have to say that this story will not touch on the issues of sex, drugs (unless we are talking about Kombucha, which is so good... it might as well be illegal) or fat-free french fries. But, I must state that I have no problem with any of them.
Prelude
It all started at the "House of Blue Jeans", my first job in the US. I was surrounded by Levi's jeans, screaming managers and angry thoughts about my 5 bucks an hour paycheck. "How will I pay my bills this month?" was a dominant thought for about 4 years of my life in San Francisco.
It was 1993 in California when I was in my early 20's. Technologies and entrepreneurs of all sorts were starting to capitalize on what later will be known as a dot-com boom (or bubble depending on how you scored). I could not imagine myself being a part of it. I was not a technologist; far from it, I had a BA in Music. What was I supposed to do with my life, my career, how was I supposed to make it if I can't even speak a proper English? Like I said, "poverty consciousness" period lasted for about 4 years, until one day I woke up at 3 AM with my head as heavy as my credit card debt. I was depressed, but I knew exactly what I needed to do.
I had a converstaion with myself that sounded something like this: "What are you thinking about? If it’s computers what pays, then do computers! You would probably even enjoy it." Don't remember how it happened, but I found myself with other neo-goldrush fortune seekers, taking software quality engineering course. Quality engineer...wow, it sounded so techy, but quite frankly there wasn't too much to it. It was all about clicking various windows and making things break with the ultimate goal of producing a popular back then GPF (General Protection Fault is it?) exception. Six months later I got my first job as Quality Engineer. I was making a whopping $45,000 per year. According to my standards today it's not too much, but it was a miracle jump compared to my previous $18K/year. About two years later, I got a $20K raise, but I was no longer satisfied with my QA career. I realized that I like building things more than breaking them. I also realized that I had choices.
Choices, the Beginning
In my late 20's I was a successful and valuable resource of my first employer, but I was still a "Quality Engineer," which no longer sounded all that great. I knew that there was something else out there, in this fascinating and mysterious world of computing. It's a world with its own cool lingo and geeky guys enjoying respect, admiration and decent paycheck. God, things they talked about and the way they talk about it were out of this world cool. It was so alluring. I wanted to be part of it so bad, but in my mind I knew I had no chance. I couldn't understand a word they said in the programming books and even if I did, I thought that programming would be too tough for me or at least that's what everyone said when I asked them about my plan to take a new turn in the career. Thankfully it didn't lessen my desire, though it did shake my self-esteem. I don't remember taking any steps to follow my dreams, but I remember wanting it more than anything else.
