| St. George, UT |

On Monday, I advised my employer of almost 15 years that our time together would soon come to an end, as I would be retiring from the company effective next month.

Though I’d been thinking on and wrestling with the topic for at least six months or so – and though I feel very confident in my decision, it was still very strange to hear myself say the words as I met with my boss.

In that split second there was a waterfall of numerous thoughts, emotions and feelings and I’m going to do my best to sum them up below.

And so…

——

When I started with GEICO, my life was a bit like a plastic bag blowing in the wind.

I was 26 years old, had worked a variety of retail jobs and was most recently making a ‘decent’ living as one of the eBay pioneers.

But I certainly had not done anything with my life of great substance work-wise and though buying and selling on eBay was bringing in some income, it certainly wasn’t what one might call, a career.

I’d kept loose track of the company since the announcement of their Buffalo site selection in 2003, a great friend of mine, Nathan, had started some months before and really spoke highly of his job, so I applied, went through the interview process and…

…didn’t get the job.

You see, I had sailed through the initial steps of the process but failed miserably at the simulated sales calls for one rather simple reason.

I didn’t ask for the sale.

In any of the three opportunities given.

Now for those of you not familiar with sales culture, not asking for the sale is really pretty much the worst thing you can (not) do as a salesperson.

Somewhat akin to walking your customer all the way to the altar and then leaving them there while you run away.

And as you might imagine a rapidly growing company, establishing a new regional presence in an area wasn’t going to be interested in folks who couldn’t bring home the bacon, mainly because they didn’t ask the customer for the bacon.

So off I slunk, having failed to land the first ‘real-job’ I’d ever applied for.

But…

A couple weeks after that audition, I got a call from the recruiting team asking if I would be interested in coming back and running the interview gauntlet for a second time in hopes of garnering a customer service position.

Though a little hesitant, I accepted, somehow impressed Ruth enough that she hired me…

And the rest as they say, is history.

——

In 2011, I transferred to Sales (ironically) and my new manager used to manage the HR / Hiring units in their infancy, back when I originally applied.

We were talking one day and somehow the story of my failed sales interview came up and she was somewhat amazed that I had gotten a second chance. It wasn’t necessarily completely unheard of, but early on the company was deluged with thousands of applicants and because of that a failed candidate was almost always relegated to the ‘come back in six months’ pile without so much as a second glance.

So why did I get a second chance?

—–

I’ve asked myself some variant of question so many times over the past decade and a half.

Why did they contact me back?

Who made that decision?

Why did they make that decision?

And why do so after a couple of weeks?

During that time most non-hired files would have been relegated to a filing box somewhere rather promptly I assume.

But either mine was not or even stranger, it was resuscitated and given a second chance.

It made even less sense as I ultimately became deeply enmeshed in the hiring process myself and learned the inner workings of bringing an applicant from A to Z.

So why?

—–

Ultimately it wouldn’t have mattered much had I not gotten the job, but I did get the job and then was able to build a long and fruitful career out of the opportunity.

I progressed into management and spent the majority of my career hiring folks into a variety of roles including hundreds of folks into front-line sales and customer service positions. The very job I had failed to land and the one that I ultimately did.

I worked with scores of agents, coordinated numerous training classes and mentored countless management aspirants.

Point being, is that over the course of that career, a lot of things happened; many of them quite good and memorable.

And none of that would have happened in the same way in which it did, had someone at sometime not the made the decision to give me a call back.

Maybe things would have been better for the individuals involved and thus, for the company or maybe they wouldn’t have turned out as well; but there is no way that they would have been the same.

——

One of the things that personally fascinates me, especially recently is the butterfly effect.

Complex dynamical systems exhibit unpredictable behaviors such that small variances in the initial conditions could have profound and widely divergent effects on the system’s outcomes. Because of the sensitivity of these systems, outcomes are unpredictable. This idea became the basis for a branch of mathematics known as chaos theory, which has been applied in countless scenarios since its introduction.

Innumerable things happen in your life as a result of decisions, that if noticed at the time at all, are seen as very minor and hardly given a second thought.

But shine the light of retrospect on them many years later and they explode into a supernova of consequence.

In the end, I guess that’s what GEICO means to me.

There’s no doubt that my life would have turned out very differently had I not chosen to take up a second chance offer for which I owe eternal gratitude.

Who knows if life would have been ‘worse’, but somehow I doubt it could have been much better.

It wasn’t Shangri-La, nor was it always Nirvana-like.

It was a great job for a great company that always asked for a lot while giving much in return. It challenged me, rewarded me, gave me invaluable business and life experience in a myriad of ways and ultimately provided me the opportunity to step away at a rather young age in pursuit of other passions.

Which is an opportunity very rarely provided in today’s workplace.

I’m very glad to have worked with the people that I did. They made me laugh, made me smile, made me beam with pride in their successes, and made me work even harder when they failed.

I watched people find partners, get married, have kids, buy their first house and check off so many of the other life items that are all but impossible to do without the safety and security of a career with a good company.

They made my life greater in so many ways and hopefully I returned at least a scintilla of that in kind.

We had an awful lot of fun over the course of the last 15 years and I’m very grateful to have been a part of it.

And though I’m doing the right thing for myself at this time and place in my life, I’m still wistful to be leaving it.

And yet I must.

So thank you to all, and to all, a good night.