Author: Mark Alexander

Hogg & Mythen Architects, Part Four

LEARNING THE IMPORTANCE OF BACKUPS

I have a ready answer whenever I’m asked that infamous interview question, “What was the biggest mistake you ever made at work and how did you fix it?”

H&M did a variety of work, but our bread and butter income came from tenant improvement projects (a client leases space in an existing building and creates offices to their design specifications). Of these, the building at 30 Van Ness (at the corner of Market and Van Ness) was primary. One of the first CAD-intensive projects we undertook was to completely measure and draw up all four floors (plus underground parking garage) of the building since these shell drawings could be easily used again and again when it came time to build out any particular area.

I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but I must’ve been fucking around with something on my system (the one where all our drawings were stored) one day and all that work was gone. Might’ve reformatted the hard drive, or updated the OS or god knows what, but all I knew was that all that data was no longer there. I checked for copies on the other two machines where we had AutoCAD installed and came up empty handed. I was in a panic. After scouring every location I could think of, I put my tail between my legs and told Nick.

Surprisingly, he wasn’t angry. All he said was, “Well, you’d better get back to work and recreate them.” Wow.

Fortunately, we still had all the measured sketches we’d done, so it wouldn’t involve physically measuring the building again, but I was looking at a lot of work nonetheless. I sucked it up, went back to my desk and started drafting.

I happened to glance over at a stack of banker boxes against the wall and noticed the FedEx mailing envelope we used to take diskettes back and forth to the blueprinters (this was before we had own own plotter on site). I walked over, looked inside, and let out a yelp that was undoubtedly heard down the street. In that envelope were three diskettes containing all the plans of 30 Van Ness. They were several days out of date (we’d started a new TI project), but damn…a few days out of date was infinitely preferable to having to recreate months of work.

My ass was saved.

Immediately thereafter, we bought a tape backup for each of the PCs and began a thorough backup routine.

SEOUL

The biggest project H&M was ever involved in was the design and construction of a new school in Seoul, South Korea. I’ve long since forgotten how this particular project fell into our lap, but it was the one thing I am most proud of during my time at the firm. Jack and Nick were pretty much hands-off as far as design was concerned, giving Neill free reign and he definitely thought outside the box on this one. Very “post modern” (it was the mid 90s, after all) I remember the main multi-story facade being a diagonal black and white checkerboard with horizontal red brick accents. The client loved it.

I didn’t travel to South Korea with Nick, Jack, and Neill even though the invitation was extended because—reasons. I didn’t have a passport, dreaded the thought of a twelve hour flight over the open ocean, and frankly, simply didn’t want to be away from home for the two weeks this visit was projected to take. So along with Cerese, I stayed back and “held down the fort” until they returned.

I just emailed Nick, hoping that he has some photos of the project he can send me. If I hear back from him I’ll post them.

SAYING GOODBYE

August 1994. I’d reached the end of my rope with many aspects of life in San Francisco. Still smarting from the breakup with Rory a year earlier, it seemed life in The City had lost all the magic it once held. Two unplanned trips back to Phoenix to deal with parental health emergencies showed me that life in Arizona really wasn’t as bad as I’d remembered—although I still had no real desire to move back to Phoenix; if I returned to the Grand Canyon state I’d definitely head south to Tucson. After much thought a particularly nasty run-in with a meter maid downtown (the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back), I decided it was time to leave. I gave notice on my apartment and at work.

They were devastated.

During the following two weeks while boxing up my life (Annie Lennox’s Diva is forever burned into my mind as the soundtrack for those weeks), strange things started to happen. San Francisco was not going to give up her grip on me so easily. The magic started returning: a cool ocean breeze, fog spilling over Twin Peaks, friends all but begging me not to leave, more than one encounter with a handsome stranger after exchanging glances…and discovering the joys of a newly-opened sex club South of Market called The Playground. (Pet Shop Boys’ Relentless will forever associated in my mind with that place and its wonderful wanton memories.)

I suddenly found myself wondering why the hell I was leaving San Francisco.  Was it really too late?  My buddy Stan was fond of telling me it wasn’t.  I wondered if he might be right.

One evening I sat down to write in my Journal, hoping to sort this all out, but I didn’t get more than a paragraph completed.  I started writing about everything that had happened during the previous week; the men, the realization that I really did have friends there who didn’t want me to leave, the magic that had come back into my life in various forms—and I wrote, “I can’t leave!”  I broke down and cried.

And then, at 12:15 a.m. that night, I made a decision.  I wasn’t going to leave.  No matter what it cost, I was not going to say good-bye to my beloved San Francisco.  The only problem was the financial Catch-22 I found myself in.  I had to leave Hogg & Mythen in order to remain in San Francisco; I needed the severance money they were going to be giving me in order to pay the two month’s rent I now required in order to stay in my apartment.  I didn’t relish the thought of leaving the guys, but at the same time I knew from my conversation with Nick a week earlier that because of the however-misplaced sense of betrayal was feeling, staying on was probably not an option.  No matter.  It would force me to find a position doing more computer and less (much less) architecture, which was my ultimate goal.

What I was not prepared for when I told him of my decision to stay was the fact that he wanted to keep me on—and—would be willing to loan me the money to pay my rent so I could stay.  Now that is something you just coudn’t find in any workplace. Needless to say, I accepted.

Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on your perspective, this magic didn’t last. It was all a ruse by San Francisco to get me to stay. Once I’d signed that dotted line, life returned to “normal.” A year later, I was packing again—and this time it was for real.

The folks at H&M at first didn’t believe me, but as the clock ticked town to the last couple days I think it finally sank in that this was goodbye. On my last day, we all went out to lunch and returned to the office where we had a very tearful goodbye. They even let me keep the infamous bright red desk chair that I’d picked out a year earlier…

Tucson lasted only six months (another story for another time), but when I found myself back in San Francisco again—and gone, and then to return again—I didn’t approach H&M other than to offer my services as an independent contractor. We’d all been through so much, and if I was ever going to make a clean break from architecture, this was the time to do it. As it turned out, I ended up at a major architectural firm for a few months following my first arrival back in The City out of necessity, but thankfully that gig was cut short by an opportunity to dip my toes into the then-exciting career of PC Support. By the time I’d left San Francisco and returned again three years later, my previous architectural career was already but a fading memory.

Would I go back and change anything if I could? Not a thing. Everything that’s happened in my life has brought me to the place where I am—and who I’m with—now, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

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Hogg & Mythen Architects, Part Three

REBUILDING

We found a new home for the office about a half mile southeast of our old location. It wasn’t the one of the several we looked at South of Market that I liked the best, but then, it wasn’t my firm. It was another older building—albeit one that passed its earthquake inspection, was entirely wood frame, and for the rent offered an incredible amount of space (we occupied the entire upper floor). It was kind of a lofty space, although not really a loft as strictly defined, even though the entire rear half the office had a structurally-exposed two story ceiling. We eventually added a bunch of color to the space—as well as painting the front door a bright canary yellow on which we overlaid the company logo in black. We also put up track lights (it was the 90s, after all) and bolted the shelving units to the wall. Lesson learned.

Our workload swelled—and then crashed—as the years passed following the move.  After the infamous Black Wednesday of 1992, things got so bad Nick and Jack were forced with either laying us all off or asking that we voluntarily go to four day weeks. Since they had done so much for both Neill and I over the years and neither one of us particularly wanted to look for work in that kind of economy, the decision was a no-brainer. When everything snapped back, not only did our workload necessitate the hiring of two more drafters, but it also resulted in raises and bonuses, the likes of which we hadn’t ever seen. Neill and I even convinced the bosses that in addition to the already paid vacation and holidays, to stay competitive they also needed to provide health insurance. Done and done.

To say that we were like a family was an understatement. When the owners exchanged words, Neill and I would retreat to the kitchen, whispering to each other that it was like when our biological parents fought.

CELEBRATIONS

We always did something special for the holidays. The first year I worked for H&M, it was a ferry ride across the bay to Sausalito for lunch. The second year was much more exciting, and not necessarily in a good way. Nick decided that we needed to go fishing on the bay. He contacted a longtime friend with a boat and off we went—during some of the worst weather we’d ever seen in December.

As I wrote in those infamous Journals (and amended some time later):

Today we went out on San Pablo Bay to go fishing in lieu of having a regular Christmas Lunch.  It was interesting, but not something I think I’d jump at again.  I’m still very uncomfortable on small boats, and even though the water is supposedly only about thirty feet deep where we were, it was murky enough to make me uneasy.

The weather today was awful.  It was bitterly cold, windy and raining.  The bay calmed down for about an hour, but heading back to the marina (in Richmond), it was very choppy.  Neill caught a 40 lb. sturgeon and we all  ended up with sturgeon steaks. I threw mine out upon returning home (I wasn’t going to eat anything that came out of that bay), and after seeing Nick bludgeon the poor thing to death on the dock, it caused Neil to become a vegetarian.

Subsequent holiday lunches were either spent in The City or down the coast, anywhere from Pacifica to Santa Cruz. One memorable lunch was had at The Shore Bird in Half Moon Bay—where I had the most delicious halibut I have ever eaten. Sadly, the restaurant has long since closed. Another year we drove down to Capitola for dinner at a Shadowbrook, a restaurant that you entered via a small tramway. (Nick got very drunk that night and while I was designated driver and responsible for driving us back to The City, it was Nick’s minivan and we had to listen to the soundtrack from Twin Peaks on endless repeat all the way home.)

(to be continued)

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Hogg & Mythen Architects, Part Two

WILD WEST COMPUTING

About six months into my employment at H&M, one morning I arrived at work to find a brand new IBM XT PC sitting on that fold-out conference room desk. Okay, it wasn’t a real IBM; it was a no-name locally-grown clone, but still…it was 1987 and this was a personal computer! It sat there for several days until I asked, “Is anyone going to do anything with that?”

Nick replied, “We were hoping you’d ask. It’s all yours.”

And so began my descent into the madness that would lead me to my current career.

Bernie (my ex, with whom I was sharing that flat with) was working as a legal secretary/assistant/word processor and had more experience with personal computers than I had. (To this point my only exposure had been with a Commodore VIC-20 about five years earlier.) I told him what had been loaded on the machine: DOS 3.1, Wordstar and some database program whose name eludes me. I’d started teaching myself Wordstar when Bernie said, “Fuck that. You need WordPerfect, and promptly supplied me with a set of 4.2 installation disks.

He was right. WordPerfect was much more intuitive and allowed me the opportunity to start creating fifteen years of obsessive, self-absorbed Journals that are at this point cringe-worthy reading.

Prior to moving to San Francisco, I had worked for a firm in Tucson that was on the verge of converting to AutoCAD. They brought Autodesk in to demo their product, and even then in the prehistoric days of 8088 processors and CGA displays, I knew this was the direction architecture was headed. Unfortunately converting the entire office was so cost-prohibitive (not to mention the initial loss of productivity that was expected) the project was shelved. But that spark of “the future” had taken hold in my imagination, and when the opportunity to obtain a copy of the program presented itself to me in San Francisco, I jumped on it.

Two roadblocks stood in the way of converting H&M to this new way of doing things: (1) I had to gain enough expertise with the program that my productivity wouldn’t be measurably impacted and (2) sell the whole concept to the bosses.

By this time I’d gotten my own PC at home, so teaching myself AutoCAD consumed me. Prior to this you would find me at the beach most every weekend (weather permitting) and sometimes even after work. That—and my meticulously curated tan flew out the window thereafter.

(As an aside, one of the things I most loved about this firm was on the first sunny day after a long, wet winter, Nick would often just close the office and say, “Go to the beach! Enjoy the weather!”)

All that came crashing down once I welcomed the electronic demon into my home. I was literally moving objects in my dreams by calling out cartesian coordinates—that’s how thoroughly and completely AutoCAD had consumed my consciousness.

But it paid off. After I felt comfortable enough putting my own set of architectural floor plans together, I suggested to Nick that on our next project we try it live. If it works, great. If not, then we continue drafting the old fashioned way.

He went for it—and many more instances of pushing the envelope—allowing me a degree of freedom to learn and explore that has been unmatched in any position I’ve held since.

The office’s original XT class computer had only a monochrome “Hercules” display. It was unbelievably crisp, but differentiating layers in AutoCAD was difficult and time consuming. I convinced them to buy a color monitor to make life a bit easier and offset the amount of money we were wasting on plots that didn’t come out looking the way they should because items weren’t on the correct layers. It wasn’t a high-res setup, but the colors at least cut down on the errors.

As time passed, the four of us settled into certain roles. Jack was the one who brought in the work, Nick managed the projects, the office, and the accounting. Neill became the de facto firm designer (he avoided doing CAD for years), and I was the guy who created all the production drawings. Life was good.

As the years went by, my knowledge and expertise increased. DOS gave way to Windows. AutoCAD and Wordperfect were purchased and regularly upgraded. We finally gave up on WordPerfect altogether after their initial foray into Windows crashed and burned spectacularly, forcing our hand to MS Word. I also somehow managed to teach myself Excel during this transition, something that’s paid off many times over the years. After spending hundreds of dollars to have our drawings printed at the local blueprint shop, we bought our own plotter. The original XT-class PC was replaced by a 286, then a 386, and by the time I left in 1995, a 486 machine. It was augmented by three others, eventually being crudely networked thanks to Windows for Workgroups.

EARTHQUAKE

On 17 October 1989 I left work about fifteen minutes early. I don’t remember why; only that I did. I was about three blocks from home, walking down 12th Street, when I rubbed one of my eyes and the contact lens rode up onto the top of my eyeball. As I was struggling to get it repositioned, the ground started shaking. “That’s odd,” I thought. And then I realized what was happening.

As my contact lens finally made it down to where it was supposed to be, the shaking continued, and I looked up to see the cantilevered billboard at the corner of 12th & South Van Ness wobbling vertically. I heard glass breaking and people screaming. The shaking stopped. A few errant car alarms could be heard wailing.

I arrived home to find my then-roommate Frank, mopping up water from the fish tank that had sloshed onto the floor. That—and the fact we were without power for several days afterward—was the extent of the damage we suffered.

The same could not be said for the H&M office at 2nd & Mission, however. Nick (who was the only one in the office at the time) related that when the shaking started, the shelves (which had not been secured to the wall) began to fall and he sprinted for the exit.

The building was red-flagged.

If I’d left work at my usual time, I would’ve been on the underground when it hit.

Like a lot of places in the aftermath of Loma Prieta, the office was closed for an extended period as the Bay Area dug itself out. But Jack and Nick—being the type of folks they were—continued to pay us as the search for new office space began.

(to be continued)

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An old coworker/friend from my days in San Francisco whom I haven’t heard from in ages in popped into a dream this morning. Seeing Neill again after all these years left me with such a wonderfully warm feeling—as if to remind me that the world hasn’t always been the shit storm we currently find ourselves in—that I decided it was way past time to start jotting down memories of my time in The City before they slip away completely.

(Even now I must publish this caveat: they may or may not be a hundred percent accurate; such is the nature of the human mind and while I can go back and read my journals from the period, I only started writing them in 1987 and I didn’t record everything.)

Hogg & Mythen Architects, Part One

When I first moved to San Francisco thirty one years ago this month, employment was not immediately forthcoming. I didn’t expect to just walk into a job, but I had a desirable skill set, and knew it would just be a matter of time before I got settled.

After about a month, a landed a job working as an architectural drafter in a small firm in Japantown. The only downside to this was that I was working as an independent contractor, i.e. paying all my own taxes and had no benefits whatsoever. It didn’t take me long to realize the office was filled with “independent contractors,” all of whom had the classification but none of the perks of actually being independent. We were expected to work in the office with fixed hours and all the tools we needed to perform our tasks were supplied by the owner of the firm. And did I mention there wasn’t ever any sort of contract for services signed by either party?

The owner was in the midst of renovating a three unit Victorian about two blocks from the office and my second partner and I (we’d moved to SF together after splitting up, go figure) ended up renting the bottom unit. That is another story for a different post.

Anyhow, as the months dragged on, I was becoming increasingly disenchanted with this employment arrangement, especially how I saw how we were all being taken advantage of. I brought up my concerns with the grizzled old bitch of an accountant who came into the office periodically (another “independent” contractor, no doubt), and I was told in no uncertain terms, “Everything we are doing is perfectly legal.”

By the time January rolled around, I’d had enough. I sent out resumes to every San Francisco architectural firm listed in the phone book. A few days later I received a call asking me to come in for an interview.

Hogg & Mythen Architects was located on the third floor of a building on the southeast corner of Mission & 2nd Street downtown that had obviously seen better days. As I entered the rickety elevator and reached the third floor, greeted by a locked gate that cordoned off the lobby from the offices, I seriously thought about just turning around and leaving.

But I didn’t.

I rang the bell, and was greeted by Nick, one of the owners. He showed me into the long, narrow office space and told me to take a seat at the fold-up conference table nestled up against a wall of bookshelves containing product catalogs and reference materials. A few moments later, Jack—the other owner—joined us and we started talking. The interview went on for over an hour. I showed the examples of my work, went over my background, and asked about the type of work they specialized in and what they were willing to pay. Despite the rather dank environment, everything sounded great and I liked these guys. It was an easy commute via a single bus line and as I left I really hoped I’d get a call from them.

By the time I’d arrived back home, there was already a message waiting on the answering machine. “We like you and would like for you to come work for us.”

And so what was to become an almost decade-long relationship began.

I started work at H&M the following Monday, giving my current employer next-to-no notice (after all, I was an independent contractor) and shortly thereafter turned the bastard into the IRS. They nailed him to the wall. He ended up having to pay back taxes on all his “contractors” and I didn’t owe a penny that year.

I was not H&M’s only employee. They had one other drafter, a guy named Neill who had been on vacation when I’d interviewed with them. We met about a week into my employment. He was a tall, lanky ginger lad who had dual US/UK citizenship and had recently graduated from UC Berkeley. We hit it off immediately, but we really didn’t bond until one day we were out measuring a building and he said something about cocksuckers. Without missing a beat, I replied, “Hey, some of my best friends are cocksuckers!” and he replied, “So are some of mine!” And that was the moment I came out to him.

Neill wasn’t gay, but being a resident of San Francisco, he was still a staunch ally. While we butted heads on several occasions, to this day I still have nothing but affection for Neill and my only regret is that over the years we’ve lost touch with each other. He successfully got his architectural license the last year we worked together, and as I understand it has long since moved to the UK, gotten married, and now has kids of his own.

(to be continued)

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