Life stories: 1986

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Three years' contract at the Geological Survey was all a Canadian federal agency could offer (they had been previously sued to hire, when they were deemed then to control one's workplace). I kept my stride however in starting a joint venture with another geophysical firm, for whom I was to offer mapping a geographic information system (GIS) services, while continuing work at the Geological Survey (now safe from aforementioned suits). I call that period my untitled MBA: little did I know if it was hard ot start a venture, it was even harder to wind it down; my joint venture partner ran into trouble at the biggest bust in the petroleum sector, and a recession is very real when even the federal government has to cut back its programs (this was the beginning of the irresistible urge for politicians to cut entire segments of civil service: it gave them rapid returns in cutting deficit at the expense of social contracts, launched by the French revolution and British industrial revolution; ironically this new trend was ushered in by British PM Thatcher and brought across the Atlantic by US President Reagan).

I loved every minute of it as I continued to stretch my own envelope. Self-employment gave me the freedom to follow my nose, and I soon discovered that GIS was the next wave. I partnered with a brilliant surveyor, who also sang madrigals (I was to revisit him a decade later in Houston, after his turbulent entrepreneurship). I also was a volunteer at the XV Winter Olympic Games in Calgary: interpreting for the Hungarian cross-country ski team left me lots of free time to watch the live video feeds throughout the facilities, front-row seats without the bother of sports commentators; those games ushered in far better computer and sound systems, as well as the large-scale use of volunteers inaugurated in the previous winter games of Sarajevo (the fate of that beautiful city in the subsequent Balkan war still my tightens heart). I took a romantic interest then in a fellow Hungarian interpreter, a flirting lass who I left due to a heritage I had yet to come to terms with.

I also took part in another new venture to publish data on compact disks (they were so rare then that CD readers had to be eased with the data). I learned then that CDs did not take off with Microsoft to distribute its ever-larger software, but for military intel as backups if an atomic blast at high altitude neutralised all circuits in the US (that included the fledgling internet, itself started as a link among academic and government institution). Little did we imagine how topical that scenario might become in the new millennium, with terrorists expanding in geography and sophistication (they also use the internet both to communicate via coded messages and to circumvent government censorship of traditional media).