Greetings. I'm an average kind of guy that has a wife (Diane) and three kids (Josh, Zach & Alyssa + son-in-law Ricky) and four grand-children (Lincoln, Miller, Chandler and Winston). My hobbies are pretty varied, everything from computers and the internet to tabletop miniatures wargaming (see Adeptus Memphis) to art and music to Star Wars costumes (see TK2651.com).

I was born in 1960, so you can guess how old I am. My parents moved to Memphis, Tennessee when I was around two years old and I lived in Memphis most of my life. I went to several different schools growing up, mainly due to court ordered desegregation ("busing"). I attended four different grade schools by the time I was in the seventh grade. In the eighth grade, my parents took me out of the public school system and sent me to a private church based school.

I attended all four years of high school at Southern Baptist Educational Center (S.B.E.C. for short) GO TROJANS! I graduated in 1978.

Right out of high school I started at State Technical Institute at Memphis (STIM) taking Electronics Engineering. I didn't like EE very much so I got a job and started working and left school behind for a while. My first "real" job was with a steamship company called Lykes Brothers. They shipped containerized freight all over the world via large cargo ships. My job was to keep track of the container inventory and monitor the inventory so that we had trailers available for customers when they need to ship their product. The coolest thing about that job was where they were located. I worked on the bottom floor of the Cotton Exchange Building in Memphis at the corner of Union Avenue and Front Street. Talk about feeling like you're in the heart of the city! I enjoyed working downtown and then the offices were moved out to east Memphis in the Perimeter Park Office Complex.

In the summer of 1981, I started looking to join FedEx. That was the place where EVERYBODY wanted to work. My sister had been with FedEx almost since they started and she seemed to like it, so I put in an application and was hired in the Customer Service Department as a Customer Service Representative answering calls for the 1-800 FedEx number. I stayed at FedEx for over 18 years and enjoyed a lot of different jobs during my career there. You can see the details of what I did at FedEx by viewing my online resume.

I left FedEx in 2000 to go into the internet and Ecommerce area. I had been interested in the internet since about 1997 and wanted to get a job in that industry. I left FedEx and joined a company called iXL. They were a very cool place with a lot of neat people and very interesting projects. Shortly after joining iXL, I was approached by a recruiter for a small company called Vention, Inc. They were located in Jackson, Mississippi and asked me to come for an interview. I had no plans to move to Jackson, but after meeting the people and discussing what they were doing, it seemed like a really good fit. They offered me the position of Vice President of Quality. Vention was a lot like iXL, very cool and trendy, but unfortunately the technology slump hit and they were not in a position to ride it out. Vention closed its doors only nine months after I started. Having sold my house near Memphis and moved my family to Jackson, I was now back in the search for a job.

Luckily, it was only two months after Vention closed that I landed a job with Methodist Healthcare in Memphis as a project manager. A good friend of mine from iXL (Steve Smith) and I joined at Methodist in the same month so it was great getting to work in a new place with someone I knew. Unfortunately Steve left Methodist to do other things, but the silver lining was that I was promoted to Senior Project Manager and was managing the Methodist Project Management Office made up of two other project managers and six project analysts.

I stayed at Methodist until September of 2004 when I moved to a new job, back in software testing with a company called Cook Systems Int'l Inc. I was the Director of Testing for Cook Systems until December 2007. In December of 2007, I joined International Paper as a Program Manager in the Delivery Management Center of Excellence. I stayed at IP for nine years and in 2016 left to take a position as the V.P. of Operations for a small food manufacturer in Danville, Virginia called Sky valley Foods. I was at Sky Valley until August of 2017 when the company was bought out and the management team was replaced. In December of 2017, I took a contracting position with Cook Systems working for FedEx Services so although I was living in South Boston, Virginia, I worked in Memphis, Tennessee and lived with my daughter in Olive Branch, MS until we sold our house in South Boston.

Once my contract position ended at FedEx, I joined a company called Presidio as a Senior Project Manager. We moved back to Olive Branch, MS in April of 2019 and that is pretty much where the story is.