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Sunday, December 9, 2007

Waxing Nostalgically



Here I was searching for Christmas wrap and at the bottom of the container was this small shopping bag from I. Magnin. Finding this was like finding a buried treasure.. of memories. I spend many years working at I. Magnin. I was just 18 years old when I started on December 14, 1981 in Carmel, CA. No experience, no education, no skills but a lot of luck landed me a job there. The girl I was dating happened to know someone who worked there. Luckily for me it was her Mom who liked me very much. With her help, I was thrown into the pandemonium of Christmas shopping at the height of the season at an exclusive, elegant store. Luckily, the people I worked with were kind, generous and delightful people. A lot changed the first five years I worked there. I changed positions a few times. I grew a lot both in maturity and professionally. I moved to the Bay Area in February 1986 to manage the merchandise handling department, then moved on to work in downtown San Francisco. Over the 5 years my salary changed from $2.35 an hour to $6 something an hour and finally $18K per year. At that time I got paid monthly. Try managing that!

I. Magnin really opened a lot of opportunities for me. I believed I would retire after working there 25 or 30 years. In 1988 after a few years of demonstrating an aptitude for technology, I moved to the Information Services department. I quickly accelerated my consumption of technology and soon became a vital part of the group. Then Macy's acquired I. Magnin and started the slow dismantling and destruction of a wonderful company. Luckily, I excellent at technology and knew what I wanted to do.

After 10.5 years at I. Magnin, Macy's outsourced the entire IS organization. I almost moved to Atlanta to work for the outsource company but decided I could not go back, socially, 20 years. So, I took the 1 year salary/bonus/severance and went to work for a small technology company. had I known anything about the technology world in 1992, I would have went to work for one of these small companies I had talked to. Let see, there was Apple and Cisco, 3Com and a few others. I remember not accepting a job at Cisco sometime back then. I was not sure they were going to around. That might have cost me a couple or ten million bucks.

I. Magnin really was a great time in my life. I was so lucky in many ways. The most important, delightful, special and exceptional thing that happened to me was being so fortunate to meet my wife there. She happened to work in one f the stores and I happened to think she was HOT. Funny how so little changes in life...

2 comments:

alienbody said...

Awwww, shucks. From: The Wife

Liz said...

That got an "awww" outta me, too.