What I Think about Working at Leo A Daly

Yesterday was my last day at Leo A Daly Company for the second time.  My first tour with the company was from 1998-1999.  The second tour started in June 2004 and ended August 7, 2013.  10 years with the company.  That’s unheard of for me!  I always figured I’d stay at a company for 4-5 years max, then move on to something new.  A new place, some new challenges, new folks.  But there was something different about LAD that made it difficult to leave, even up to yesterday.  I think it’s worth a little of my time to reflect back on the last nine years, for my own sanity and memory.  If you’re a potential employee reading this, just remember I’m an IT guy and not an architect/designer/engineer, so the world of LAD is going to be explored through a very narrow window. 

I have a hard time thinking of bad times at LAD, although there are a few that come to mind that I’d rather just let die with my memory cells.  Instead I’ll focus on happy memories.  As I walked out of the building for the last time yesterday, I looked around at parts of the building and a rush of memories came over me.  That happened there.  That person worked behind that window, I walked down this hall that one time, etc., etc.  I think it’s a great thing that I can have so many fond memories of a company (I won’t say that about previous employers) that I can look at a building and feel a rush of emotion.  I think that says a lot about the building, the company and the people in it and then impact they all had on me.

• I think my favorite LAD memory is the early Christmas parties when the IT and Accounting folks and their families would stick together and get really, really drunk.  It was a camaraderie that is hard to find at most jobs, and one that I think we all reveled in.  We were a lot alike in those days, and we enjoyed celebrating the season together. 
• I got to travel working for LAD A LOT, easily 3-4 trips a year.  My favorite trip has to be my first visit to the Las Vegas office.  It was my first time in Vegas, and I finished my work with almost 2 full days of spare time to walk up and down the strip, ride the rides, play some poker, sip some scotch, see the sights and really experience the upper levels of the town.  I was young, single, in pretty good shape and I didn’t let anything stop me.  I walked all over Vegas that weekend, and the memories still flood over me to this day.  A great, great weekend.  Trips back to Vegas have never been as sweet.
• In my travels I visited Vegas, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Minneapolis, Miami, Milpitas (San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area), West Palm Beach, Phoenix, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas, Houston and Austin.  Each time I got to spend lots of time visiting the sights, seeing old friends and family, getting really good at traveling through airports and got to see a lot of the country.  In my new job I will not travel, and that’s okay since I really want to be home with Mindi and Alex right now.  Even still, when I look back on my time at LAD I feel privileged to have gotten to see so much, do so much and experience all I did while doing something to make the company better.  I hope future jobs afford as much travel and adventure.
• Many of my favorite memories come from those travels.  Having lunch with the Tautges family at Mall of America.  Big pizza slice in WDC.  Chatting up homeless guy in Los Angeles.  Getting hit on by the chicks at the bar in the Standard (hell … the Standard Hotel alone was an experience.  The Topaz too.).  The vastness of Houston.  Walking along the beach in Miami.  Driving down to Key West.  Walking through Caesar’s Palace for the first time.  The good hotels.  The shitholes.  Web conferences from hotel rooms.  The $100 food/drink bill for the ESPN Zone in Atlanta, and watching the Bears-Packers game in a room full of Bears fans.
• In nine years, I moved the data center 3.5 times.  The 0.5 comes from the current move that I left half-finished.  The worst was the overnight move when Rob and I got stuck on a system that wouldn’t come back up right.  Thank God for cigarettes and the Quik Pik down the street.
• I only yanked a power cable out once.  Of course, it was for the Omaha office file server, so it disrupted a lot of people.
• The only huge networking mistake I made took down the Denver office for about 30 minutes.
• My trips to Denver were definitely some of my favorites.  Denver was the office I helped design and build from the ground up.  I went out there twice to make sure it opened properly, and revisited the office several times before it got downsized this past year.  That was heartbreaking, to take down something that I’d spent so much time building.  I think of the faces of the people who worked in that office and I’m reminded the good works I did while I was there that helped so many people.  I had many favorite offices to visit, but Denver definitely meant the most to me personally.  I can’t tell you how close I came to moving out there and working from that office back in 2008.  Wouldn’t that have been something?
• I will not miss the late-night pages from devices going down.  I will also not miss the late-night calls from Hong Kong.
• I’m debating what to do with all those ties.  I still have some from my first days at LAD.
• While I would never recommend working from home, it was very special to be able to work from the back office in Columbus, Ohio.  I helped do some amazing things from that command center.  I marvel at just how much I was able to do with softphones and video conferencing while in my PJ’s most of the time.  Plus I was able to be there for Mindi and Alex and the company when they all needed me.
• May I never, ever work in a cubicle as small as that spot by the server room in Omaha.  God, that was a year that I’d like to erase from my memory.  I wasn’t a manager by that point, but I was doing the work of 2 people and had a “cube” designed for 0.5 people.  Bleh.
• It would take multiple blog entries to go into how wonderful people the LAD employees were, past and present.  Most of my true friends are friends on Facebook and always will be.  My respected colleagues are connected to me via LinkedIn.  The enemies I made, and there weren’t many of them, can just go fuck off and thankfully many of them are no longer with the company. 
• I wouldn’t have thought nine years ago I was capable of making enemies in a company I worked for, but there were about a half-dozen assholes who knew better than to ask me what I thought about some things.
• I grew a spine while working for LAD.  I look back at all the things I couldn’t have done when I started that I can now because I grew so much in confidence and overcame so many adversities while working there. That confidence helped me in so many things outside of work as well.  Those are the best things I take away from my time there, and they are priceless. 
• I learned a ton at LAD too.  Not just about being an IT guy, but also networking and management and vendor relations and how businesses are run.  I helped shape policies and projects and plans in ways that I once considered “adult.”  Heh.  Yeah, I’m definitely an adult now, and I’m proud of it.  I enjoyed sitting in meetings with the biggest managers and leaders in the company and being able to hold my own, to speak confidently and to say what I thought.  I know that will never go away.
• It’s sad, but each time I met Mr. Daly I never looked good.  I’d be wearing a stupid tie, see him in off days in my scrubs, have a scruffy face or be setting stuff up and be covered in dust and dirt.  I’m glad the guy never remembered my name, because while he may recognize my face he probably thinks this guy just doesn’t like to look good.  LOL.

I believe that we are all a sum of our experiences, and our successes/failures in life are determined very much by the things we do, the places we do them and the people we do them with.  I look back on nine years with LAD and marvel at my personal accomplishments, the amazing technologies we deployed (I didn’t have a smartphone when I started!), the people we helped and the great work we did.  I worked with some great people (for the most part) and have a treasure trove of good times and lessons learned.  In the end that is a great job to me.  I’m sad to leave and excited for the adventures to come.  But I’m blessed that I can look back at 10 years and think of so many good memories that I can say I was proud to have worked there.