Lee Geiger

Success doesn’t come to you, you go to it.

Marva Collins

Keith Geiger (a.k.a. my son), a junior at Carnegie Mellon University pursuing a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics with a minor in Computer Science, is looking for a summer internship opportunity. He’s proficient in programming languages Java, Python, and C. He also knows his way around an Excel spreadsheet. Keith is available to interview in the Bay Area during the week of March 9-13, and he can start working as soon as mid-May. And he comes cheap. For the right opportunity, he’ll even work for free. Call or write me if you’d like to see his resume.

 
I was desperate. It was already mid-April, and the CMC spring semester would be over in a few weeks. The economic recession of 1981 was in overdrive, and based on the number of rejection letters lining my bathroom stall, I had zero summer job prospects. Mean Jean, my girlfriend from Scripps College, and I had planned to spend the next semester together in Washington, D.C., and she had already secured a high-paying summer internship with Bank of America in San Francisco. Shacking up with my parents for the summer in their Sacramento apartment wasn’t an option because, as my father so eloquently put it, “you’re 21 years old now, and you’ve outgrown the sofa.” Luckily, my mother had heard from an old family friend about a spare bedroom available in Menlo Park I could rent for $50/month. I grabbed it faster than you could say ‘Reaganomics.”

Trickle-down economics hadn’t reached my parents, so my first priority was to earn some cash. After moving into my summer digs, I scanned the classified ads in the local newspaper (Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet) and scored a job with the San Jose Diablos, a professional volleyball team, as a general assistant, i.e. someone who could type and wash uniforms, preferably at the same time. Back then I could burn the keys off an IBM Selectric, and I knew my way around a box of Tide. And the job lasted until the end of the season, which was August. Alright, alright, alright.

Three weeks later, the league went bust and folded. Back to the classifieds.

A Hallmark store at a glitzy mall in San Jose was looking for an assistant manager. I sweet talked the owner, a lovely elderly woman who was hard of hearing and laughed at my jokes, and convinced her I needed to take a couple years off from school until I could save enough money to return. She believed my little white lie and hired me right on the spot. But working for barely the minimum wage wasn’t going to cover my tuition, much less the requisite pizza and beer. So I returned to the classifieds to find a side job for my side job. There, buried under the heading “Temp Jobs,” was the following: “Immediate Opening– Parking Lot Security Guard—Nights only.”

Booyah! That job had Geiger written all over it. But Mean Jean was going to be less than happy.

Scott’s Seafood Restaurant had just opened a new location in Palo Alto, right next to the 101 freeway. Management believed they needed some mope to walk around the parking lot to deter thieves spilling over from East Palo Alto from pilfering their customer’s car stereos while they dined on fresh frozen salmon. The job was perfect because A) I could come straight from my Hallmark job, and B) it came with a free dinner. There was just one little caveat; should, perhaps, a brawl ever breakout in the bar, I was expected to join in and make peace. “No problem,” I said, even though the only thing I had ever fought in my life was indigestion.

The moral of the story? I survived the Summer of 1981. Just as important was the lesson in learning how to fend for myself. On the flip side, Mean Jean declared a Cold War on me and dumped me and our plans for D.C. I ended up going to Washington by myself, where I found an internship with an economics consulting firm that led directly to being hired after graduation as a commercial banker, at a company where I would eventually meet up with The Pretty Blonde and produce two pretty cool kids. Every so often, I’ll wonder what would my life would have been like if I had snagged a must-have summer internship with Silicon Valley heavyweight Compaq Computer.

I hope Mean Jean fared better than Compaq.