Thanks to Koros Derakshani’s recommendation, I landed a job with a consulting firm in town, O’Connell Robertson and Associates (ORA). Otherwise, I would have ended back at Sonic. Thanks, Koros!
The ORA staff consisted of a secretary/accountant, three designers/draftsmen, an architect, an electrical engineer (Zane Burley), and four principals (just like they have in law firms). The principals were Bill Adair (a Professional Engineer), Rick Burnight (a licensed Architect), Jerry Hammerlun (an attorney), and the president of the firm Noel Robertson (no degree or license). The year is 1988.
We were on the top floor at 800 Barton Springs Road. The principals were all in window offices with a truly spectacular skyline view of Austin from a block off the shores of Town Lake. My workspace was in the “bull pen,” partitioned spaces in the interior separated by four-foot walls. Each work area had a large drafting board on one side, facing a small built-in desk and a bookshelf.
A few years after I left, they built a giant parking garage across the street, transforming their spectacular view into – ugly concrete. Hah. Is there a God or what?
I was hired for my mechanical engineering degree but I started off as a draftsman. Manual drafting. I learned HVAC design along with drafting. (I really enjoy drafting by the way, an artsy skill I used often later on. Evil never wins. . . ) I also did electrical drafting for Zane, who’s cubby hole was right next to mine.
We designed large buildings. ORA’s specialty was hospitals. We also did a ton of work for the Austin Independent School District (AISD), some for the military, and quite a few good projects for the State of Texas’s Energy Conservation Office (SECO). I imagine having a disabled veteran on the senior engineering staff helped them land a lot of those plumb projects.
Bull pen? Sure, the Texas Longhorns played across town, but it still sounds kind of – industrial. Antiseptic. Plugging engineers into little cubicles. But I actually enjoyed it. I could hear every conversation in the office from my desk, which was right in the middle of everything. Learn a lot that way.
And you know me, I soak it up like a bone-dry sponge.
After four years I became licensed as a Profession Engineer (which requires five years of working under a P.E. – but I had one full qualifying year at Exxon). Eventually, I was able to “seal” (authenticate with an embossed or ink seal like Notary Publics do) HVAC, electrical, and energy conservation projects. I did smaller, simpler projects at first, but I also participated in all the hospital and other projects. Bill Adair did the major HVAC projects. Zane Burely all the major electrical projects. I did the smaller ones, both HVAC and electrical (with some review by Zane and Bill).
Very soon I could do almost all of the electrical (lights, power, signals), but HVAC for giant buildings is very complicated. Bill had his own draftsman, Roy Phillips. I was Zane’s draftsman/designer, both for manual and then CAD drafting. Eventually, I did all the AISD projects – design and drafting of all the engineered systems. Sometimes even little architectural details as well.
Around 1991, three years after I started, computers made their way into our workplace. Computers were clunky at first, but very quickly manual drafting turned into computer drafting using CAD (using a mouse with MANY keyed buttons). Bill Adair never learned CAD. Zane Burley? Hell, I think he still used a slide ruler. (Only kidding, but he was elderly at best and not a computer person.) I picked CAD up very quickly and soon I was designing and drafting simultaneously.
There are a lot of calculations that go into the engineering design. Lighting levels. HVAC sizing. Energy analysis. We had representatives for lighting manufacturers do the lighting calculations (every room requires a specific light level, and there are thousands of fixtures to choose from and hundreds of bulbs, colors, etc..).
I used dBase to create a nice lighting calcs routine which was used on all our projects thereafter. I also built a program for that VA hospital in Temple, Texas to do short circuit and other electrical calculations. There were no commercial programs otherwise available to do these analyses. I wrote papers on my computer programs and presented them at the Hot and Humid Climate Symposium in Dallas every year.
One year I presented three tech papers in Dallas!
ORA had a major contract with SECO, the Texas State Energy Conservation Office. One year we had a contract to do energy audits of a dozen small hospitals in central Texas, the Small Hospital Energy Management Program, SHEMP for short. A few years later, there would be monster computer programs to do an annual energy analysis of buildings. Back then we just had “nomographs” which are graphs that approximate energy consumed by walls, windows, and floors, based on annual weather inputs.
It’s a time-consuming, painstaking process, using those nomographs. I came up with the brilliant idea to transform the nomographs into mathematical equations. It was tricky. The equations were really ugly. But when you build them into a spreadsheet, the calculations were instantaneous.
I did the math, but Patricia House presented the results to the SECO office across town, to get approval. (How is that fair?) I drastically reduced the firm’s time and expense to fulfill that project but didn’t get any credit.
So what did I do? Doh! I wrote it up and presented the method at a Dallas symposium the next year. In retrospect, I think this didn’t go over well with ORA. Now everybody could use that method to bid on energy conservation projects.
I was the Design Review Engineer for the SECO program, which was the largest Energy Conservation program in the world at the time (funded by an oil overcharge settlement some years before). I reviewed the blueprints for every major project and submitted comments. Cutting-edge projects that would be years before going mainstream. Ice storage. Load shifting. Time of Use analysis. All extremely powerful ways to lower energy costs.
The Austin school district (AISD) was big on Ground Source Heat Pumps GSHP). You drill holes in the ground, insert a piping loop, and instead of rejecting heat to the outside air with a fan, you reject heat (or, in the winter, absorb heat) to the ground. GSHP systems are much more energy efficient. I designed maybe a dozen systems for AISD, with maybe 30-50 cooling tons each.
I belonged to many engineering societies. Lighting. HVAC. Electrical. I was on the Editorial Board (my name was listed on their masthead) of Engineered Systems Magazine, the flagship magazine for our industry. I also published a regular series of articles on saving energy in Texas Schools magazines. The Austin American Statesman newspaper had a small box on the front page with my energy tips.
KFON AM Radio (a Clear Channel station whose office was down the hallway from ours – also with a Top 40 and a country western station) ran regular 30-second spots I recorded every week, “BTU Bill’s Energy Tips.” One year my brother John, a graphic artist/journalist by now, made a small booklet of all my energy tips with fun little illustrations.
We had tons of work, and I kept very busy. My brother John worked as a temp for a while, helping do the grunt work on a really big project; he said I worked three times as hard as anybody else in the office. I did all my AISD and other small projects and also did design work on pretty much every project we had. I still have all the time sheets.
Somewhere in there I got called into Noel’s office. Something about finding my personal diary on my personal computer I kept in the office (to do my dBase programs), where I poked fun at the principals. I had to confess about my Army psych past.
A condition of my employment thereafter was that I see a therapist every week. That would be Dr. Hillary Parra, at the Austin VA Clinic. I learned a lot from her – and I would need it all, you can be sure.
If you thought I was busy before, my workload doubled now. (Remember the medieval, frightening Rusk State Hospital, the living epitome of what all good Texans think of the mentally ill?)
If John said I was a workhorse before; now I pulled a whole team of horses. Impossible deadlines on all my projects. Entire designs weren’t approved – do it all over again!
I no longer got approval to present papers or publish magazine articles. I was Chairman of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Geothermal Energy Committee at this time. I had to send my keynote speech for the annual meeting to be given by a subordinate.
At one point, I went to see a patent attorney to see if I could secure any sort of rights to my computer programs. He was an Annapolis grad. Wow! Finally, somebody who’s on my side. He negotiated with ORA. But then. He – ended up representing THEM against ME.
I submitted a grievance to the Texas Law Board. He won, of course. Nothing unethical at all about stabbing your own client in the back. Not if your client was a mental case. Texans are mighty damn proud of their extreme bigotry.
After all I’d been through? Huh. I took it in stride. Found new outlets for my energy. Bigger outlets! I had been writing a book on energy conservation, and it was accepted by Business News Publishing (the parent company of Engineered Systems Magazine).
I was appointed by my Texas State Senator to a brand-new licensing board, The Psychological Associates Advisory Committee (PAAC) as a public member. Those are school psychiatrists, for young kids. This, of course, went over VERY well in the office.
The PAAC Board’s large certificate hung in my little office space. They could hardly stand the sight of me or my certificate at this point, I’m quite sure. They relocated my desk to a new addition area.
Out of sight. Out of mind.
Along the way, before – they’d brought me to several meetings across town to SECO to discuss my Lone Star Energy Conservation design reviews. They’d ask me to write up notes afterward. They were quite detailed. Hammerlun said several times, “What, did you bring a tape recorder?” That’s the old Academy training at work – where we had to remember so many odd details every day? Excellent short-term memory.
So, maybe they moved my office out of earshot because they didn’t want me “recording” everything.
Then they threw me the ugliest project you can imagine. A giant GSHP project for the Austin Community College (ACC), for their multi-story classroom building on Rio Grande Street. There were no existing blueprints. It was a VERY old building. None of the electrical or HVAC was organized much less lined out on paper. I was given the entire job – new lighting, new HVAC, new signals, the whole shebang.
I got ‘er done. Showed the plans to Bill Adair. Do it over again. EVERYTHING!
I’d already done it in record time. Now I was given HALF the time. But I got ‘er done. Wrong thermal heat recovery system, he said now. I want you to use McQuay’s enthalpy wheel. (The principals were tight with McQuay’s rep and took him hunting on their deer lease all the time.)
But my Trane design is a fraction of the weight – sitting on top of a 100-year-old building full of students on a roof made of crumbly old concrete that we don’t know sh*t about? Our structural engineer said it’s okay. The old man with Parkinson’s?. . .
Well, when the blueprints went out for bids – with MY engineering seal on the drawings – the Trane system was spec’d out.
You know what’s coming. Bigots always react the same way. I was hauled into a meeting with the four principals. You’re fired. You belong in academia. You’re grossly incompetent. There are no laws against firing somebody because they’re too smart! (Really, quote-unquote.)
Texas is a “right-to-work state.” Yeah, tell me about it. “Right to fire!” A year later McGraw Hill published my energy conservation textbook (BNP ultimately drug their feet). The following year they published another textbook on electrical design (which is still in print, 25 years later).
Gross. Incompetence?
As I walked out of that meeting – where I had expected RIGHTFULLY that I would be promoted to a principal of the firm… I was white as a sheet. (This was on April 1st, by the way. I have the time sheet.)
As I walked out of that glass-walled conference room with the million-dollar view – boom. Paul Tutt was right there, the AISD Superintendent – the man who loved my work on his schools. Best designs. Clear. Efficient. Lowest bids. Excellent supervision during construction. (I was absolutely fascinated with GSHP systems.) All the contractors loved working for me. Threw in their lowest bid. Still made more money than on other projects.
How, exactly, do you explain to your best client that you just fired your best engineer – hell, the best engineer in town? I. Have. No. Idea. But they called Paul Tutt into a private meeting. Twisted is arm somehow. Who knows.
Bill Adair showed my photo to all the employees after I packed all my things and left. “DO NOT LET THIS MAN IN OUR OFFICE.”
Excuse me, Mr. Adair. While you were holed up in your extremely messy office with the million-dollar view doing calculations on your kindergarten pocket calculator, I happened to be making friends in the office. Talking over the 4-foot walls with them. Motivating them.
I hollered with them when we worked all those Texas football weekends when the Longhorns scored. While you were out on your tax-deductible deer lease “marketing” to your corrupt industry co-conspirators.
An architect friend of mine who remained at ORA told me not long after the firm hired three engineers (and one full-time draftsman also, I believe) to replace me. That’s how much work I did – for a fraction of that they even paid that new draftsman.
They paid me at best $10 an hour (given all the overtime I did) and billed their clients $100 an hour for my services. Well, now they could bill their clients $100 an hour for THREE engineers – do that math.
Sure, I could have asked for a raise. Probably should have. Maybe they would have respected me more. Promoted me. But I’m a schizophrenic. I know people are afraid of my illness. There’s a million mistakes I could make on any given job. Talk about liability!
Maybe their liability insurance carrier made them pay higher premiums because of me. Maybe having a disabled veteran on the senior engineering staff for ten years, and the extra points you get when bidding on all the federal and state projects ORA got – maybe they didn’t need me anymore.
All this time, I was just happy to be doing engineering. I didn’t care a hoot about the pay. I was happy to wake up at 5 AM to drive my faded blue Geo Metro to the express bus stop in Cedar Park. Arrive at the office by 7:30 or even 7:00 when the traffic was light.
Get a day’s work done by the time everybody else showed up. Take off at 5:30 after everybody had left for the day (leaving any earlier just got you caught in traffic), get home by 7:00. Supper. Knee exercises. Hit the sack.
Now that I am 25 years older and a few days wiser, I realize that ORA took a big risk hiring me. Or, at least, keeping me after they found out I was schizophrenic. I was smart enough to recognize that at the time. To accept it. I was resolved to be my usual cheerful, happy self, and to enjoy the work for as long as I could.
The next step for me at ORA would have been for me to design the really complicated designs that Bill Adair and Zane Burley did. I guess that was just too much for them. I still hate their guts. Always will. But I did have some really excellent times with the guys in the bull pen.
Oh, wait – there’s the soap box . . .
Excuse me, but compare this to how gays behaved back then and trans people now. “We demand rights. Recognition. NOW!” Wait in line, people. Women have been waiting patiently for ten thousand years. Let them earn their just due. Show some respect. Humanity. Dignity! You’ve been hassled for – what? Once or twice. During the maybe last couple of years?
Gird up your loins and deal with the stress and hassles for TEN years. NONSTOP. Show your meddle. Earn your campaign ribbons. Show the world you have every right to be there. THEN raise your hand and ask if you can please do the work you are overqualified for.
I appealed the firing to the Texas Employment Commission (TEC), demanding “sweat equity” for all I had contributed to the firm.ORA’s attorney principal, Hammerlun, testified under oath that the $30,000 I got when I left was that equity. Lie. That was the distribution from my company retirement fund.
This telephone hearing, by the way, took place in Dr. Hillary’s office at the VA. I was working for Jasmine Engineering by now, and Jasmine refused to let me go to the TEC offices for the meeting. So, I set it up to coincide with my weekly VA therapy session and made the phone call from right there – with Dr. Hillary listening in.
Incidentally, Doc Hillary cut me loose soon thereafter. “There’s nothing more I can do for you.” Excuse me?
I just got FIRED. With MALICE. I had to appeal from inside your effing office because my next employer refused to let me fight ORA and her hero Noel Robertson?
(I later figured out that after ORA, I didn’t have any private medical insurance the VA could bill, so- viola! You’re all cured, Mr. Bill.)
I appealed to the Professional Engineering Licensing Board later on. PE’s are required to seal all projects in which they participate. Working on a new appeal, I realized that ORA only let me seal the AISD projects (and a few others) where I did all the design work.
Every OTHER project where I participated – doing calculations with my computer programs, doing Zane’s electrical design, or Bill Adair’s HVAC analysis – should have had my seal also. (I have all the time sheets proving this, by the way.) Pretty much every project that ever went out the door should have had my seal on it. The PE Board didn’t do anything. (With my luck I would have been the one who got in trouble.)
Bill Adair knew I did fully half the work he got credit for. Zane Burley (who wasn’t a principal) knew this, too, regarding OVER half the work he did.
Maybe the other principals Rick Burnight, Jerry Hammerlun, and Noel Robertson didn’t know this. All they saw was the small AISD projects that went out the door with my seal. (Although all the other projects were listed on my official time sheets.) As it was, and an attorney I talked to a few days later said just this: “So, they got credit for all your work. Get a grip.”
What’s going on here?
These are rational people taking vicious action against something of an authority figure in the Austin engineering community. I was well-liked by the contractors in the field. My office mates. A disabled veteran.
I think what set them off was an article I had published a month or so prior in HPAC Magazine, one of the industry rags with HVAC and mechanical news for our industry. It wasn’t the stature of Engineered Systems, but it had a wide circulation, and everybody read it to keep up with developments in the industry.
The article suggested a link between bad Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). ADD was increasing at epidemic proportions (still is, in fact) back then. In school children. Who interested me. A lot. All those AISD projects I put my best effort into? The appointment to the Psychological Associates Advisory Committee? Energy conservation articles targeted at public schools? B.T.U. Bill’s radio spots?
But first, a little SCIENCE.
HVAC design at the commercial level is a great deal more than just maintaining a comfortable temperature and humidity. You also must provide fresh air because people need oxygen to breathe, and the carbon dioxide we exhale must be gotten rid of. A typical classroom full of students must have the whole volume of the air exchanged with 100% fresh air 6-10 times per HOUR.
The equipment I got fired over was a “heat recovery system.” Twenty classrooms in a building with 20 students in each equals 400 people. The entire volume of that whole damn building has to be ventilated out 6 – 10 times each HOUR. The heat recovery system was to try and recover some of the cool from the air exhausting and transfer it to the fresh air going in. (Vice versa in the winter.)
When the “enthalpy wheel” McQuay system that ORA ended up installing failed, the whole building had zero fresh air. My design had no moving parts, so it was impossible to fail. My system was actually more energy efficient too. (I did a very thorough engineering analysis which I showed to Bill Adair. He. Did. Not. Care. He wanted the McQuay wheel installed.)
Be that as it may. . . What happens when that outside air system fails?
Carbon dioxide builds up inside the classrooms. Available oxygen is diminished. This is just what happens when you go to a very high altitude and come down with “altitude sickness.” Which is oxygen deprivation. Except our situation is worse: you have a lack of oxygen as well as carbon dioxide buildup. (CO2 is toxic.)
What’s the connection I alleged? Well. The symptoms of ADD are exactly the same as “altitude sickness.” In order of increasing exposure time: Poor attention span. Confusion. Lack of affect. Psychosis. (I would dare add “sexual confusion” to the list now.)
My article simply stated the above. I suggested: what if bad indoor air quality has something to do with the ADD epidemic among school kids? Kids spend all day in classrooms. Shouldn’t we investigate, as engineers – especially as Professional Engineers, whose #1 Prime Directive is to “protect the public health?”
Now let’s talk about the ENGINEERING.
You have an inkling of the huge VOLUME of air that’s sucked into that classroom building to keep the air fresh and healthy. In Austin, and along the whole Gulf Coast, that air is very humid. That air does NOT cool down until you wring the water out of that air. That costs a boatload of energy.
If you close off that outside air even halfway, you can decrease the facility’s utility bills by half. (ballpark estimate) THAT’s how much energy it takes to maintain a healthy 6-10 air changes per hour.
Public schools are always short of cash, now more than ever. So much so that practically nobody has PE classes for kids anymore. They’re too expensive. Way back then, President Clinton tried to get $1 trillion from Congress to bring the nation’s schools up to 1990 code standards. Never happened.
The 6-10 air changes per hour is the ASHRAE standard. (It varies for occupancy, activity, etc.) The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-conditioning Engineers, ASHRAE is the global standard of excellence. But it’s just a STANDARD.
There is no ENFORCEMENT mechanism.
PE’s design to this standard, but the facility engineer has no obligation to check or maintain anything once the system is installed and OPERATING.
There are no penalties for bad IAQ. No oversight to look for bad IAQ. (All you need is a CO2 meter in the air stream to check it – similar to a smoke detector.) Nor can you really tell the IAQ is bad other than “stuffy air.” (And perhaps a rash of kids coming down with ADD.)
Now for the LEGAL angle.
Obviously, kids getting ADD is a terrible thing. But a link between ADD and air quality? O.M.G. The school district being held liable for closing off the outside air to save on their utility bills?
That’s HUGE. Armageddon!
Jerry Hammerlun, the attorney principal at ORA saw this subtext in my article. He knew damn well that sh*t flows uphill. Kids get sick. The School District is served notice. OMG. How come the engineers that designed our goddamn system didn’t ENSURE oversight? They can do that? Sure. With a $100 CO2 sensor. They didn’t?
Hey, you people told me to lower the utility bills at all costs.
I must have said a hundred times in my McGraw-Hill textbook, Retrofitting for Energy Conservation, “You do NOT sacrifice air quality to save energy.”
Well, maybe it’s all a grandiose delusion. There’s no scientific evidence that IAQ and ADD are connected. These days, with the whole trans LGBTQA+26 crowd, and the notion that bad IAQ might cause “sexual confusion” . . .
Like, who’s going to fund THAT investigation? North Korea? Hamas? Russia!
Yeah. I really screwed up this time. Hoped for the best and got the worst.
But, wait. We don’t KNOW that’s why they fired me. Sure, the liability implications for the HVAC industry are terrifying. Holding consulting engineers liable for something they designed 30 years ago? Fifty! Forcing them to perform oversight for every system they install?
Are car manufacturers liable for defects for the life of their vehicles, making allowances for wear and tear? Every other manufacturer? Why the F not building manufacturers? It’s a damn miracle they AREN’T. (Actually, you can see how they have achieved that “miracle.”)
How DARE this upstart engineer even SUGGEST the idea. Much less put it into PRINT.
Yeah. You see it too, don’t you? I’m quite sure that article was a mitigating circumstance, too. But there’s still no PROOF. A legal problem requires legal proof.
Ahhh, my friend. But there WILL be proof. DAMNING proof. And, as you have no doubt learned to expect in this sordid nightmare tale, it blindsided me at the worst possible time. . .
But let’s not put the cart ahead of the draught horse. Back to the present.
With all that had happened to me before, THIS time I had a backup plan. I had met a nice lady while investigating the ACC Rio Grande Campus. Dr. Connie Park, a school psychologist. Native of South Korea. Attractive, very. She was fascinated by engineering. We became friends.
She had just purchased a house in Round Rock, north of Austin. It was a ratty old house, but the living/dining area was big enough to do group sessions for a contract with the state she had on the side. Counseling for sex offenders out on parole.
We reached an agreement – as the romance moved along from first base – Mr. Bill will help you fix up the place if he can use the back bedroom as an office. Agreed! We did some painting. Sheetrock work. One of her patients did the electrical. Another refinished the wood floors. The house still looked like crap outside, but inside it was looking good.
It was in a central location. Perfect for a consulting engineer office. (If you’re wondering at this point about me dating a Ph.D. psychologist – ironic, maybe, but she did know about my past history.) I never set up the office, of course. It was just a diversion, for both of us, starting up a nice relationship. Two workaholics doing a work project together?
If that’s not love, what is?
I’d dated several other girls while at ORA – even moved in with Channa for a few months, from Laos I think. A counselor at the School for the Deaf. LOL. We went to see Schinbdler’s List for Valentine’s Day. And she didn’t even break up with me! (Talk about a keeper.) Still needed me to dig her a giant garden in the backyard. Paint her house. Once the place was fixed up, she sent my big cat Gateau and me packing back to Lago Vista.
A Hispanic lady. I was at her house in Austin (on the other side of the tracks) when Schwartzkoff invaded Iraq. Didn’t last, either. Later a one night stand with a nurse.
Even a date with a black DJ at the radio station. Morganna McAnn. (She visited my house in “whitey-ville” once. You can see why that didn’t last. My wonderful little green house? How DARE you.)
An adorable blonde with MS who came to a company function with me one 4th of July. (my favorite of them all.) Even a Black woman who had a side job teaching cheerleading routines to high school kids.
Lots of very smart single women in Austin. Never shoulda left. Haven’t gone out on a date since. Pity. I miss that. Lots.
Anyway. All the architects at ORA did outside jobs. “Pro Bono” work, as lawyers do. You get paid a little for it, but a fraction of what they’d have to pay a large consulting firm. I did quite a few jobs like that.
I regularly sealed HVAC drawings for Comfort Mechanical. My friend Badoui at Comfort (a Palestinian, I believe) and I had talked about going out on our own. You don’t get paid much for those jobs, but it’s a good feeling, helping out.
Basically, Badoui did the HVAC design for some large building. I reviewed his drawings, made some changes (did some calculations as needed), and sealed it. Never had any problems whatsoever. Not long before I left ORA, Badoui died. He was a good man. Very jolly. I liked him a lot.
“Praise be Allah!”
By the time ORA fired me; well, I got right back on my feet – running! Within a week I had a whole library of design manuals from all my industry rep friends in town. Trane. HVAC. Lighting. I had my own copy of AUTOCAD. A halfway decent computer with a big monitor. All my engineering design computer programs.
Connie and I set up our own DBA (Doing Business As) company, ARK Associates (the common denominator of Park and Clark). Got liability insurance fairly cheap with Schumer. Paul Tutt at AISD gave us our first official job. A gas-fired furnace needed replacing. I printed out the blueprints at Miller’s Blueprint downtown.
Too bad it was also our last job.
Connie had a roommate. She was a real peace of work. Connie was so cultured and nice. The roomie was a wall of bricks. Assistant principal at Austin High School.
Never saw it coming…
One fine afternoon Connie and I were on the cusp of – you know what. In the front room of the house in Round Rock. Breaking in a nice new couch.
Then there’s a KNOCKING on the door. Screaming. YELLING.
I struggle off the couch, button up my trousers – open the door. WHAM. I was right on back in grade school at the principal’s office.
Connie’s roommate and I got in a tussle out in the gravel driveway (I didn’t do crap, never been a fighter, never). She BEAT on me in the driveway. Neighbors showed up. The cops.
She YANKED hairs out of my head. Ouch. I need that hair. (I was going bald by this point in time – some much for the lady friends.)
The cops broke us apart. Asked if I wanted to press charges. I said no. Got in my faded blue Geo Metro and drove home to Lago Vista.
Connie and I talked it over a week or so later. Yeah, her roommate is gay. No, I do like you but I’m – well I don’t know what I am. Probably bisexual. We parted ways. I lost my Ark Associates office and – again – all the time and money I put into the place (I traded Pro Bono services with one guy to install her kitchen counters, etc.)
About Connie. Look at this evil woman. I don’t give a hoot in Hell if she’s a Ph.D. psychologist or not. Nobody has the right to be bisexual like that, indulging her hedonistic lust (using her psychology skills on us, to boot) to destroy the feelings I had and those of her ugly horsefaces roommate. (Connie was quite attractive, as half of lesbians seem to be – she could have any man she wanted!) “Oh, boy. I can have my cake and eat her too.”
Oh, but wait – the donkey won the contest.
They lived happily ever after in their beautiful Lakeway house. Hey, this is working out. We can have an open relationship while Connie seduces all the hapless men she likes. When the jerk gets too close; well, we can fix that.
(Which leads me to that uncomfortable statistic that 50% of all homosexuals are HIV-positive. That means, on average, every gay couple has at least one HIV-positive partner. How’s that a relationship? One drop of blood and – boom – welcome to the HIV club. Women? Menstruating several days each month?)
Anyway, I just met my first lesbian and my first bisexual. I was ticked off, sure. But not prejudiced. I don’t want to be prejudiced. It makes me feel dirty. It’s not as if I didn’t have plenty enough reason to be.
I have a book called Thoughts and Feelings, The Art of Cognitive Stress Intervention (1981). Chapter 14 is on Orgasmic Reconditioning – the idea of getting aroused by say a Playboy centerfold, and transferring it to – well, your real-life girlfriend. It works! (Can’t say I’ve ever tried it. But it wouldn’t be in that book if it didn’t work.)
The next edition (that came out in 1982) left that chapter out. The whole damn practice has been banned! Why? Because it makes homosexuals look like – well, they can be“fixed.”
My point is this: Orgasmic Reconditioning can be used for many things. For example, a wife whose husband has lost all his hair, and she doesn’t find him attractive anymore. The husband whose wife has become overweight. The ugly kid (male) who’s only attracted to the hot chicks.
None of them (were you one of them?) can any longer benefit from this very simple and effective technique. Why not? Because homosexuals (who incidentally, I’ve read – in their own somewhat disgusting postings online – “get off” on porn, often – as in VERY often) banned it!
Here’s a scientific study that will never happen: Put a homosexual on a desert island without all that porn stimulation. Will he still be gay a year later? I posed many other such experiments (scientific studies that will never happen) investigating the homosexual phenomena, in one of my philosophy books later on.
Hey, if they want to be gay. Hallelujah! Have fun. Enjoy your time on Earth.
But just because social media gives you the pulpit to bully people, that gives you no right whatsoever to eradicate important tools that can help other people get the max out of THEIR time on Earth. That includes folks who want to stop being homosexual. Sure, right now it may be hopeless but absolutely no research has been done on the issue. Personally, I think it’s a valid area of research.
All this happened within a few weeks of leaving ORA. I felt like I’d been set up by Connie and her co-conspirator roommate. You get him to fix the place up, then I’ll get rid of him. Probably should have pressed charges for battery, but this was Austin. Very gay friendly. A high school principal versus an unemployed veteran? Not good optics.
I wasn’t big on lawyers either, not after what happened in the Army – then the patent attorney who turned on me and joined up with ORA to rob my swank computer programs (which somehow never quite got to working right after that.)
I moved on. That’s what I do.
However. I’d lost my appetite for being out on my own. All that planning. The nice office in Round Rock. I didn’t have room for all the tech manuals my industry rep friends gave me in my tiny little house. Had to throw them in the trash. That cost me. Because those thick books come out of the industry reps’ shallow pockets.
All this pretty much ruined any future of hanging up my own shingle as a consulting engineer in Austin. “Clark Engineering.” Has a nice ring to it. Solid. Reputable. I’d like that. Really I would.
I still have my Texas P.E. license.
Connie was a real bitch. You can get into big trouble, showing that kind of disrespect to a Professional Engineer. Theft of services. Theft of – everything! But, again, Austin was extremely liberal. Asian? Female? Bisexaul? Three strikes and your out – of the door, buddy.
Gee thanks, Connie.
I had an interview with Jasmine Azima, P.E. Iranian, about my age (she called herself “Persian.”) Jasmine Engineering. A minority woman-owned business. Sounded like a good opportunity. Really liked the idea of working for a woman. Apparently, Noel Robertson gave me a good reference. (Or maybe not. You’ve already seen how Jasmine refused to give me time off work to go to the TEC grievance meeting against ORA a few weeks later.)
“I’ll give you every Friday afternoon off.” Pretty much the same pay I was getting at ORA (not that pay mattered much to me.) I’d do all the engineering. They had a CAD computer. One worker. Just opened a new office in the ground floor lobby of an office building downtown. Plenty of work lined up already. Main offices in San Antonio.
All that was pretty much exactly where I was with Ark Associates, so I took the job. (Stupid me, I should have talked to the designer she’d just run off.)
A week later, I was working well into Friday evening. Then Saturday all day. Well, I was beginning to regret my enthusiasm for working for a woman-owned minority business.
But not for long.
There was too damn much work to be done! And you know me, working my buttocks off is a cure for my broken heart.
(for a while)