Billy Cook

Mary and I decided to get married and we also wanted to get back to Maine where we both had experiences in our earlier lives. We hired a head hunter to get us jobs at Unionmutual Life Insurance Company (which became UNUM when it demutualized).  We got married that first year and bought a house in South Portland. Five years later, we had our daughter Elizabeth.  Five years after that I took a job with Sybase in Atlanta and we relocated there.  It was during the 1996 Olympics and life was pretty easy.  Oh Atlanta…..

I was offered a job in Atlanta creating the first video on demand internet streaming service.  This what you would call your set-top-box for your cable TV.  My team handled the menuing and back end billing for renting movies, etc.  While I was doing that I started an Y2K practice with the hope of advancing Sybase technology and services to help solve customer’s problems.  After a couple of years, Sybase decided to back away from the whole Y2K business as it wasn’t their “core capabilities” so I was recuited by IBM to become part of their Y2K Center of Excellence team.  We moved back to Maine because I was never going to be home anyway and we didn’t really have any ties or support system in Georgia.  Mary was bummed. She like Georgia and had a lot of friends at her job.  Ahoy Maine (again).

Moving back to Maine was a good idea in the long run.  I was frequently gone on business for long stretches and Maine was a safe place to raise Elizabeth.  Maine also didn’t have all of the social stressers like traffic, crime, and the like. We lived very close to the airport where I could commute to the various locations I was deployed to.  Back home, the weekly grind turned into a rut where I would unpack my suitcase, do laundry, repack it with the same clothes and then take off Sunday nights for parts unknown.  A couple of years into that, our whole practice at IBM left en masse to go to work for a company that previously did secret DoD work when they decided to branch out into the commercial space.  This group was down in Bethesda, Maryland and I commuted there from Maine weekly for about two years or so.  The “dot com bubble” was happening then and I was lured away by a start-up that did knowledge based information systems.  A couple of years later, that company was acquired (as many of the dot com ones consolidated) and I was let go.  To shorten the rest of the story, I went to work for an insurace rating software company as an “Engagement Manager” and then back to IBM for six more years doing some incredibly stressful mega projects where I was successful.  IBM had a “resource action” and I was laid off and did itinerant Senior Project Management work for the next six years bouncing around the Portland, Maine market until I landed at United Healthcare.  I took that job at UHC with the intention of riding that until I retired.  It was almost relaxing to work there since the position was easier than anything I had done since back at the Aetna.  I worked there just under five years and then ultimately formally retired in April of 2023.

So here I am, retired, comfortable, unstressed, unemployed, and loving it.  I haven’t figured out what I am supposed “to do.”  People ask me about that all the time and I half-jokingly say, “Nothing, absolutely nothing.”  Someday, when I fall into a natural retirement rhythm I might get back in the saddle but for now, I’m just living my life on my own terms. Watch this space for what’s happening next.  Cheers.

Winter in Maine.  It’s beautiful, cold, wet, and for me frustrating.  Since I really only have fishing as a hobby, I am keeping myself busy building this website you are reading and also building my other main endeavor, the Maine Beer Tasting Rooms website.  The MBTR site has a lot of potential and I am enjoying putting together curated “Beercations” to help people explore the various tasting rooms in reasonable chunks.  More on this later.  Cheers.