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Ryan
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Promise Land of Trustafarians
 
2018-06-08, 23:59

Alright, here goes.

About five years I was just out of college working for an awful giant consulting company. I quit after six months of flying to frigid fucking Boston every week all winter to babysit an excel spreadsheet in a cubefarm. I wound up moving back to San Antonio and through some connections landed at a startup as their first employee. That took me up to Colorado. Over the next two years we raised a few million bucks, got some early traction and then it sort of ran out of gas. I was halfway out the door when they fired me anyways. Wild ride though. Blew through millions on I don't really know what and we never made a dime. For some reason Google bought the withered husk of the company anyways, but I was already gone at that point.

Through a connection I only knew on Stack Overflow I landed at job at the big blue bird social network. Literally got my offer letter the day the last CEO resigned and I've now ridden out the rough years. It's definitely put my career on a bit of a (very lucrative) rocket ship. Now I lead a team and honestly this part of my life couldn't be going better. I just returned from speaking about my work at a conference in Berlin.

I went really deep into world of credit card churning and became *that guy*. I've earned and burned about 2.5 million miles and managed to fly around the world several times in first class for very little money, so that's been fun. 25 countries in the last few years. I spent three weeks in New Zealand last year that left me very tempted to move down there and I think I'm close to pulling that trigger as soon as I finish paying off this student loan. Some of you may remember that I was in Tokyo during Fukushima. Radiation hasn't kept me away—I've been back six times since then.

More personally, last year I finally started intensive therapy for my anxiety. I hit a bad spot last year with an attack that left me balled up on the floor terrified of nothing in particular. I lucked onto a fantastic therapist who focuses on intensive short-term treatment rather than long-term talk therapy.

Finally started rebuilding a relationship with my brother.

Never did find a dating life though.

Whew. Good to see everyone back.
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