Lynnae over at BeingFrugal.net hit me up for the "Life Gave Me Lemons" meme, so here goes.

 My lemonade moment was the first time I was fired.

I was working for a big-chain office supply store in 1992 as a ‘business machine salesman’ (that’s a computer sales geek, but this was before the Geek Squad, Firedog and all those kind of in-house organizations). My job was to sell as many white-box computers to small business owners as I could.

This was also shortly before the Home Foreclosure event.

The wife and I were unable to find ANY jobs in the little college town where we were living after she got out of the military, so we both found jobs at the nearest larger town that we could. This turned out to be in my old home town, about an hour and fifteen minutes away from where we lived.

To make thing more interesting, the only jobs we could find started about 2 hours apart (hers started at 6 a.m., mine at 8 a.m.) and we had only one car at the time. Oh, and it gets better. The car we had was a little Sprint, good on gas mileage, but with a busted heater and a broken back-side window. So in the winter time, we would both bundle up in multiple blankets, jackets, mittens, etc. to keep ourselves from freezing to death as we whizzed down the road at 4:30 in the morning.

She would drop me off at the Denny’s across the street from work, and I would have a REALLY long breakfast, while waiting for the workday to start, and she would take a nap in the car in the parking lot in the evenings, until I got off work.

We left before dawn, and there were very few days we got back before dark. We started making jokes that we had forgotten what our town looked like in the sunshine, it got so bad.

So, Here’s Your Lemon

After repeating this routine for a few months, we finally realized that we couldn’t keep the house, and that we were so close to the edge financially, that even a small breeze would teeter us over.

Then, I got fired for not making sales quotas.

There went half our meager income. At the time it was about $8/hr, and that was barely getting us by. I hadn’t been able to find anything else before starting that had paid NEAR that in the area. Remember, this was during the economic problems we had during the early ’90s (Bush Sr. Desert Storm, Economics Rebate/stimulus package. All sounds eerily familiar). And wages in the mid-west weren’t what they were on the coasts. Even the computer field hadn’t really picked up yet.

So here I was trying to figure out how to make ends meet, having gotten ‘comfortable’ in a low-paying, dead-end job without realizing it, and close to bankruptcy.

Time to Make the Lemonade

Then one of my best friends told me to come apply at the place he was working at, doing computer system support and management. They happened to have openings, and he knew I was deeply into computers.

So, I went in, had the interview, and took this little ‘programmer’s aptitude test’ they had, and the next thing I knew, they offered me a permanent position AT MORE THAN TWICE WHAT I WAS MAKING BEFORE! (Come to find out years later that I had scored the highest they’d ever recorded at the time).

This turned things around for the whole family. We were able to move to a rental house that my wife’s  friend had for rent, and we got rid of the house officially (there was nothing we could do to save it even WITH the new job. It was too far past due). We started getting our finances back in shape and got back on the road..

We also had a baby! (Talk about good timing!)

With the new job, and the subsequent stability and raises, we did good. We had weathered the worst of it, and had come out the other side, bruised and scratched, but still healthy and whole.

The experience taught me two things that I still hold dear to this day.

    Never Give Up, Never Surrender. Giving up is the worst thing you can EVER DO!

and

    Never be COMPLETELY satisfied with your job. Even good jobs change. People move on, Bosses change, and there’s always something out there that can be better than what you have now.

Now to pass on the meme.

The Rules

LIFE GAVE ME SOME LEMONS
- IT’S OK, I MADE DELICIOUS LEMONADE – MEME
Rules:
* Copy and paste these rules to your blog post.
* Link back to person who tagged you.
* Write about an incident in your life you first thought was really bad, but ended up being a blessing.
* Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
* Let each person you tagged know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
(* And if you want to – link back to this original Lemonade Meme post too.)

I’m going to tag:

• Laura at Green Panda Treehouse
• Jesse at The Penny Saved
• Shanti at www.antishay.com
• LM at www.llamamoney.com
• BeThisWay at http://justshootmenow.wordpress.com/
• Hank at My Investing Blog

Thanks Lynnae, for including me in this meme. It brings back a lot of good (and bad) memories.

Do you have a Lemonade Moment you’d like to share? You can leave a comment and tell us about it, or if you’re a blogger, link back here or to the original meme post and join the fun!