Bob Follett
Friday. When I started this journal in 1998 I was working in the IT department of American President Lines, a then American container ship company headquartered here in Oakland, now a Singaporean container ship and logistics company headquartered in Singapore. I thought it best to keep a low profile by using “The Sole Proprietor” handle and not reveal the company name as corporations (double that for Asian corporations) really like to control internal information and go to great lengths to keep employees from opening their mouths in any kind of public forum. In other words I liked my job and didn't want to walk in one morning and discover APL and I were no longer on a first name basis.
A number of my fellow workers have always known about this journal - I ran a web cam imaging the intersection at Broadway and 12th Street in downtown Oakland from my then manager's office for the first couple of years - and, although I always understood my journal was at some level a gamble, management never gave me a second thought and kept me on the payroll. I have no complaints.
Now that I've retired, although I'm not sure a bio link will turn out to be useful (I've had people tell me they do prefer them), I've added one to my home page. That's what I call my “angry plucked chicken” self portrait, by the way. I kinda like it. There's a rambling narrative of the life and times (less a lot of other folks names for purposes of propriety) that I'll add over the weekend and we'll see if this “sails” (a little nautical terminology, you understand, having once worked for a shipping company).
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