The End of a Government Career
Life in the Real Word

The year was 1995. We all had known about the military base closures and that our base, the one official office left operational in San Francisco's Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, would be closing soon. For me that was in July. I'm sure there would have been a opening for a working GS-12 Naval Architect Technician down in San Diego or up in Washington state's Puget Sound (my seniority would have granted me that opening), but my roots were and always will be in the Bay Area. I decided to stay. Jobs were sparse as hundreds, maybe thousands scrambled for a job with the government. I even had a few close leads, but only to lose the bids to those who wanted a promotion within the department, even though I was more qualified. As a result, I decided it was time to do something else for a change, and a 18 year government career came to an end. Imagine, I could have retired in another 16 more years.

Some of the benefits left to a former employee experiencing a layoff with the government is that one is entitled to severance pay, unemployment benefits and retraining. The first two were essential in paying the bills. The retraining was my saving grace and possibly my last opportunity to have someone else pay for my education. In the last years with the government, I was introduced and given tasks related to computers and networking. "Computer Aided Design" or CAD was just making a name for itself in our office, even though other offices throughout the country had been with CAD for years. I picked up on that lead and decided to retrain in computers.....to be more specific, Networking. It was something new and a way to use what I had always considered a hobby to save my work history.

To make it official I had to be trained. The schools available were plentiful, but I looked to an old alma mater and returned to Heald College. As an alum, I was granted a kind of scholarship, saving the government a few hundred dollars in tuition costs. The curriculum, Novell Netware networking--the result, certification. It would take all of nine months to sit through rigorous hands-on training and often dry, technical lectures--something I hadn't done in years. This time I was unemployed--a student by night and Mr. Mom by day (with breaks attending job fairs and interviews).

Yes I was a Mr. Mom for about nine months. During that time I had the chance to bond a little closer with the youngest and create a lot of friction with the oldest. I watched game shows in the morning, ate hot lunches and continued with Montel and Sailor Moon in the afternoons after I picked up the older one from school. Occasionally I'd go job hunting, but that usually did nothing more than stress me out....what job could I get that was not related to naval engineering without the proper training? Not much! In the evenings I'd cook dinner for the family once again, but then later I'd head off for school. It was a relatively short drive to and from class, and again, as it was in 1979, in the dark. There was no real graduation this time around as it was just training. The rewards came in the form of a job.

With the help of the placement office at school, I received a few interviews in the new field I had chosen. There weren't any takers during the school year, but once I took the exams and got certified, I got my first nibble. Granted it brought in a little over half of what I had made with the federal government without the benefits and time off, but it was a new beginning and a job. It was the first doorway to the real world, the one I left my foot in for over a year.