Headed Back to Camp

With my friend constantly bringing it up, camp was on my mind a lot at that point.  I had been going for a year by that point, besides skiing in Utah that January.  I really needed a break from LA, which was starting to get to me, much more so than it had in college when I had been more isolated from SoCal culture.  But it didn’t seem likely, considering how deeply I had entrenched myself, both at the office, and with other clients I had developed relationships with while waiting for Bandito to get off the ground.  I managed a couple of websites, and supported the infrastructure of a couple other small companies when I had time, which was getting harder to find as Bandito grew.  I had basically phased out working for the guys at our old office by then, and had no shortage of thing to keep busy with.

Then late one night that spring, while I was sitting in bed trying to fall asleep, the Lord showed me how to make that happen.  One of the friends I had been visiting back at school every weekend was about to graduate, and had no immediate plans.  He was a multimedia major, and we had worked together a lot.  We had worked on the same projects, he had replaced me as the supervisor in the IT Dept, and he was one of the guys from my programming team and who had explored NAB with me.  We had even hired him for a few days when Bandito moved into their office, to help me wire it.  So I could let him stay in my apartment, and fill in for me at work, while I took a much needed break.  It would give him some experience in the industry, and allow him to meet people and network, to find a more permanent job once I returned.

Most people would probably recommend against something like that, since I was trusting him with my “life” while I was gone.  Besides him potentially screwing it up while I was away, there was nothing to say that I would get it all back when I returned.  I definitely didn’t have any formal agreement with my company about any of that either, but we had few formal agreements anyway.  The only thing I had in my favor was that I am pretty good at what I do, to a degree that no one else is.  That is the basis for my current position as well.

I had received an email two years before, from the new program director, inviting me to come back to work at camp.  So I dug around to find it, hit “Reply,” and sent off a response saying I was interested, without ever acknowledging that the invitation was from years ago.  If anyone ever even noticed that, they never said anything.  I interviewed with them while I was home for Easter, and the arrangements were soon taken care of on that end.

I was also in the process of moving closer to work, to cut my commute time.  I ended up finding a place just down the street from my office, so I could walk to work.  This was especially nice considering the parking situation we had, sharing about eight spots for everyone in the office, including visitors and deliveries.  So shortly after I moved into Hollywood, my friend graduated and came to stay with me.  There was a two week overlap before I left for camp, so I could get him oriented, and introduced to everyone he would be working with.  He had recently shifted from being a conservative Christian, who made student films that were so preachy that they made me uncomfortable, to a dedicated atheist skeptic.  So we argued philosophical issues every night until about 2am for those two weeks.  He is the only guy I know who I can’t win those kinds of debates against, since he doesn’t hold those views out of ignorance.  Those conversations left me headed to camp for the summer with a lot of philosophical and theological questions and objections that I didn’t have answers for.