| Why Oracle? |
The story of how I came to be at Oracle is worth recanting. It was the spring of 1993: I was still in school pursuing my combined degrees, and I decided I needed to conduct a few interviews with companies, on the off-chance I should actually graduate in the coming months. It was mid-March when I was flown out to California for a full day of interviews at Oracle. (This was after a rigorous first-round interview, I might add, which consisted of two questions: "Do you know what you want to do [at Oracle]?" and "Would you like to fly out to California for the next round of interviews?" Well, duh.) During the day of interviews, I hit it off quite well with the person then in charge of recruiting for the Applications Installation group in technical support; it seems both she and I had a soft spot for jobs that tended to our short attention spans. By the end of the day, I was almost guaranteed a job, so I was in pretty good spirits.
These spirits could only be described as heightened as I drove around Redwood Shores, soaking in the new atmosphere. It was in the high 70s that day, very sunny, and the ducks were in full populous across Marine World Parkway. I sat down by the water, soaking in the good weather, and writing a few postcards to family and friends, thoughtfully pointing out how much nicer it was here than wherever it was they were. I'd always wanted to work in the Valley, and I was pretty confident I would enjoy being at Oracle, but it was hard getting used to the thought that I'd have to leave Boston behind. I'd grown quite fond of it during the six years I was there. Surely, I'd have to think about it before jumping into a decision like this.
Thirty-six hours after my return to Boston, the Superstorm Blizzard of '93 struck, and it didn't take much thinking after that. My car was buried in a four-foot snowdrift, and remained there for three days. I managed to take the subway to my girlfriend's house, just before it shut down (the buses already stopped travelling to Watertown, where I lived). Once there, we realized we had no food, and started calling around frantically to find any place within ten miles that was open, even if it was just a gas station. After a few hours of frantic phone calls, where even 24-hour convenience stores played recorded messages saying they'd closed down, we sought refuge at the only place we could find that was open: a bar in Harvard Square called The Hong Kong. It was the only time I ever saw the place so empty, the bartender called us to the bar by name.
So the timing of this event helped to pretty much clinch the decision for me: I would suffer through no more New England winters. Job or no job, I was headed for California. Fortunately, the job did come through, and the rest is history.