bigicard72

well wtf, it's 12:15 on what I'll call a sunday night, and I'm cruising' thru the new s101 interface & started checking out old pics i'd uploaded over the years... it's 2017, and it's probably been 4 or 5 years since I was a regular poster around here... still I was surprised to see that 13,000+ posts has me around the top 5 or 6 posters here, even after a 4 year absence ...makes me feel like I gave up some good living to rack up those stats, but I gave up some living to rack up these pics too... but these pics also represent my ticket out of mediocrity... I actually made some cool shit! ...but I also got spoiled, jaded, and eventually burnt out

Anyway, cruising around & seeing this pic I gotta add the backstory:

The last company I ever worked for, before Island Sign, was a couple running a brand new shop in early 1996, trying to start up a print shop/ sign shop/ typesetting shop & they wanted to get me to quit my $10/hr job with Kerry at Pacific sign, for a similar job where I'd also get to help open up a new shop with all the wasted expertise i had from the mainland that Kerry wasn't using... I liked the sound of this opportunity, especially considering that I couldn't count on 20/hr a week minimum with Kerry. Andrew and Allison had offered me 40 hours...

I wanted to take the job, but I wanted a raise & they said $10/hr to start, but $11/hr after 3 months so I fit my life around their offer, AND I expected they would honor their word to the same degree that I put value into it. They were flakes through & didn't deliver on their promises of a work experience, AND they also wanted to try to dodge the pay rate I had been promised. I reminded them, this was non negotiable, because we already negotiated it & I changed my life for them.... but they were all about themselves, so they chickened out of paying what they promised me, and fired me instead!

Being fired made me so much money & made me so much happier for the next 10-15 years, it's a joke tho think about it, but it's also my life story
The reason this image is significant is because of the day I got fired. It was 9am, on a Wednesday and I was planing to go snowboarding on the Big Island that Friday.
When I got fired at 9am, I drove to Stella Blues in Kihei, (owned by Deadheads from Oregon who overlapped my Oregon roots running a booth at the Oregon Country Faire) and bought a burger & a beer, to set about pondering this new twist in my life. I wondered if I could afford to follow thru with my awesome plans for snowboarding in Hawaii!

Along with the frosty morning beverage & my early lunch I also bought a Rick Griffin flying' eyeball T-shirt and sat there trying to decide if I should be responsible, or go snowboarding on Friday. I finally realized I should head to Big Island that night, and get an extra two days of adventure before I figured out what to do about all this news. The first night on Big Island, I connected with an old friend who was starting a drum building company & he hired me too make his logo. So that was my first freelance job as an entrepreneur, after decades of just being a hired gun, doing jobs for some boss who was doing it for the end user. Now I was dealing directly with the end user & it felt great! So that image represents my first instant of self employment!