My name is Cyrus Epler. I am fifty-one years old. I was born in Rhode Island back in the fifties. I am currently married with two children. I currently am unemployed and while I look for work, I am trying to make a go of it writing on the Internet.
My professional background is a bit convoluted. I wanted to follow in my father's footsteps and become a ship's officer. However, the Coast Guard would not give me a license because of my near-sightedness. I wound up going to college with no clear idea of what I wanted to do. In hindsight, I should have known, but I just didn't see it back then. As a kid, I used to draw elaborate and detailed ship designs, and if I had actually thought about it, I would have gone to school to be a naval architect or engineer. However, (and I don't say this to blame him, my mistakes are my own) my father had a deck officer's disdain for engineers and it somehow never occured to me to try to be one. I guess his attitude rubbed off on me a little bit. So I went off to college and drifted for a few years. After a bit, I decided that I was wasting my parents' money and I had to do something different. In the end, I dropped out and joined the Navy and trained to be a submarine radioman.
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Who Am I?
I spent six years in the Navy, the last four of them on a fast attack subamrine, the USS Dace (SSN 607). We did two Med tours but, it being a submarine, I didn't see to much of the world. In the four years I was on her, the Dace only pulled into seven liberty ports and I missed two of them. I joined the Navy mainly to straighten myself out and get the money to put myself through college. But by the time I got out, college costs had exploded and there was no GI Bill for Cold War veterans of my era.
I got out of the Navy and drifted for a couple of years. I eventually got into a tech school to be a COBOL programmer and did that for twelve years. I never liked it, but the money was pretty good. Business programming bored me to tears. I could never understand how we managed to take so much wonderful technology and make it so boring. Eventually, I decided to try my own business. It didn't work out and was probably ill advised for me to try it. My wife certainly wasn't happy that it didn't work! Especially when I had to sell our house and move to Tallahassee, back doing boring business programming. Even worse, really, because I was contracting for the state's Medicare system. When my wife wanted to be back near her family, I was happy enough, at the time, to move back to Connecticut.
When we returned to Connecticut, I was unable to get a job as a programmer. COBOL was pretty much obsolete and the insurance companies all wanted a degree that I didn't have. I got offerred a position with a small air freight handling company. I was told it would be a fast track to management, so I thought that I would give it a try. After I was there for three months or so, suddenly they hired someone's nephew and he was doind the work I was supposed to be doing. I asked my boss what was up and he just gave me this dead paned look and asked me what I was talking about. No more management track for me. I got laid off a few months later. (The kid who took my job ran his car into a tree and broke his neck so it didn't work out well for him or the compnay.)
After that, I took advantage of a federal retraining program and took a year long course to be a machinist. I thought, learn a trade, always be able to support my family. I thought that I would be able to make enough money to go back and work on my engineering degree and the two things would go hand in hand. But, the money was not what I had hoped for and the college degree hasn't happened. I have worked as a CNC machinist on and off for the last three years except for a short stint as a Census Bureau technical help desk person.
