My wife, Susie, and I are off on an adventure. We’re about to open a retail store selling vintage photos of New York City, antique maps, advertising art, and what she terms “impulsive essentials,” which are those things you didn’t know you needed until you saw them and then you knew you could not live without them. This is new ground for us. Neither of us has ever run a business before, and certainly we have never tried to run a business together. It’s hard enough to run a family as partners, but after nearly seventeen years, we’ve kind of figured that one out. Here we go throwing a monkey-wrench into the works.
Why, you may ask, would we choose to do this?
There are many answers to this. I will go with the easy one. Maybe I’ll tackle the more subtle, psychological aspect of things at some future point.
The easy answer is: Susie inherited her father’s collections when he died several years ago. He had been a collector of all things New York. I mean all things. We have pieces of subway rail, lateness reports for the IRT line for 1984, chunks of Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds, an engraved invitation to the opening ceremonies of the Brooklyn Bridge, city planning maps from the early 1900s, and books like you wouldn’t believe — history books, novels, coffee table books, travel guides. But the bulk of his collection, the centerpiece and crowning glory, was approximately five thousand photographic negatives, dating from the 1880s to the present.
We’ve actually got a lot more than that, but you get the idea.
Susie’s father, Hugh, died in October 2005. He left his collection to Susie and her mother, jointly, but for reasons too complicated go into, Susie ended up with the collection. Some time around August, 2006, she finally cleaned out his apartment and had all the stuff hauled to an office in Kent, CT, to an office space about 25 minutes from our house, and for the next three and a half years she worked part time from that office, selling post cards and transit maps and other small memorabilia on eBay and doing the occasional big photo print job for one or another of her father’s former clients. Generally, she broken even, basically working enough to pay her overhead so she could continue to store the massive amount of stuff without draining our bank account.
Then, in February, 2009, I got let go from my job managing the help desk at Wachtell, Lipton. I’d been working there for about thirteen years, first as a temp on the help desk, then as a programmer for about 10 years, and finally as the help desk manager. I’d stopped enjoying the job quite a while ago, the commute from New Milford to New York being a large part of it and the fact that I was never an IT guy on purpose being the rest of it. Somehow, in the mid-nineties, when the internet was just taking off and businesses were still struggling to deploy Windows and Word, I found I had a knack for computers and could make a decent living helping people use them. It was fun; I wasn’t afraid of them. It just wasn’t my bliss.
Well, lo and behold, thirteen years later, they kick me out, give me some severance, and I have a new opportunity to follow my bliss. I just have no idea how to go about doing that.
I have an MFA in writing I got before I fell into IT. I have two novels I wrote on the train during seven years of commuting. I just have no idea how to turn those things into a viable career.
While I’m thinking about my next move, I’m still doing the standard things, punching up my resume and submitting to the job sites, making a web site, spamming my friends, and out of that I get a call about a programming consulting gig. The people are really nice, project sounds interesting, so I write up a spec and we talk about it, and they hire me.
Somewhere in the back of my head Al Pacino is screaming, “Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in!”
How did this happen? How do I keep getting good paying work at something I’d rather not do? And why do I keep taking it?
Anyway, winter of 2009 rolls around, and I’m still doing the consulting project — mostly because I grossly underestimated the complexity of the project — it being my first spec as a consultant and my first programming in two years, I forgive myself. But I’m not happy that it is taking me so long, nor is the client, although they’re too nice to complain. Susie, meanwhile, is trying to ramp up her business to compensate for my ever-more-apparent failure to make a go of consulting. She starts talking to me about retail space, about doing a web site. She’s tired of Kent, the space isn’t big enough, it’s second floor, the landlord doesn’t want to negotiate on the rent, even though the building she’s in is losing tenants daily, in short, she’s out of there.
There’s space in New Milford, right on Route 202, lots of traffic, half way between home and school. It’s ideal.
We take the lease. We’re in business.
Of course, we still have to open our doors. We still have to find the balance in working together. We have different approaches to things. She’s trying to achieve an aesthetic; I’m trying to achieve positive cash flow. She’s patient and calm. I am decidedly not.
But we do balance one another, and I am therefore quite hopeful of success. She has taught me to believe in the Impulsive Essential. Some things you don’t know you need until you see them, and then you know you can’t live without them. Sometimes they’re small gift items. Sometimes they’re something much bigger.
Often, they are the beginning of an adventure.