re: The Butterfly Effect: Tiny Things that Changed Your Life

I wouldn't have met my wife if my friends hadn't asked me to go to Outback for MNF and a steak.

20 years later, with 14 y/o twins in high school.

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. I went septic after surgery to repair a rupture in my intestines.

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Your sepsis probably already set in prior to surgery with your perfed colon, assuming it was your large intestine. Unfortunately, that can be common if not caught in time.

But glad to see your recovery.

You are my hero and my stiory cannot compete with yours.
So I guess I’ll try to tell mine. Even though it’s not a butterfly effect it is a crazy story nonetheless. It’s not as wholesome as most of the stories here, but it’s what happened.
In 1978, my sophomore year in college, I broke my leg at practice, while playing football for a small college, SLU),. That was when we still had those H shaped goalposts that just had a little bit of padding around it. I caught a pass for a touchdown, but wrapped my right shin around the goal post causing a compound external brake That ended my football career. Met my soon to be wife, and later ex wife, and much later wife again. I started taking school more seriously, pursuing a degree in Biology. I even worked summers for the Wildlife and Fisheries at Grand Terre Island. However, the second semester of my junior year I was offered a job to go to work for Gulf Oil as a production operator on an offshore oil platform.
I’m going to fast forward a bit and not get into how I met my wife and that kind of stuff, but we decided I would work while she finished her degree.
Not long after I asked her to marry me, and we had a big wedding only to discover on the morning of the honeymoon that she was pregnant. Back then we did a lot of canoeing and one week on my week off, we did a trip down the Buffalo river.
Afterwards I flew back out to the rig to go back to work. While I was on the rig, to surprise, they had brought the dogs out to sniff for drugs of the living quarters. Also, to my surprise, I had a little small roach in my backpack, which they found, and then fired me on the spot. By this time my wife was eight months pregnant, (not a good time to lose your job), so I started building stone fireplaces with my brother-in-law, which I loved, but didn’t consider as a career.
Fast forward a year and she becomes pregnant again with our second son. I was a real dick at the time, due to the cocaine use and I went to a party on New Year’s Eve by myself, leaving her at home alone. While I was at the party, I ran into a friend and his wife. This guy‘s brother was a former Heisman Trophy candidate. My friends wife was beautiful, and come to find out they were a little kinky. After a shite load of cocaine, they asked me to go home with them, for a threesome, which I unfortunately did.
Big mistake! But a bigger mistake was telling my best friend who had a thing for my wife, about it. Surprise surprise he told her about it and she soon became my ex-wife. I was crushed! After a little while I took a job at a food distribution company loading pallets to load on semi tractor trailers. That really sucked but I did my best with it, and in no time I got a promotion to the front office printing out stickers for the selectors. There was a very pretty girl in that office, which I soon began to bang. Problem is she was the project manager‘s son‘s fiancé. Not surprisingly we were soon told we had to leave and we did. This girl was beautiful. She looked like a Barbie doll and since she was from Chicago originally, she convinced me to move there with her to find work. So I took a job at a temp agency., Which allowed me to do little jobs at various places. I ended up at a place called “OcuSafe”. I had no idea what they did, at the time, but I was assigned to print out reports and bind them for the client. Turns out they were a major occupational safety and health consulting firm that did work for the asbestos manufacturers. They were traveling in small teams all over the country and used young, recent college grads as associate consultants.
The leaders of these small teams were heavily credentialed professionals. They were certified industrial hygienist and certified safety professionals. A couple of them even a jurist doctorates. They were short on associate consultants, and since I had a science degree background, they decided to recruit me as well also to travel around the country I did jobs at places like the World Trade Center, Aspen high school, and many places, including the athletic dorm at the University of Miami, and I could see Jimmy Johnson in the practice field. This job allowed me to fly all over the country and I often flew back home to see the ex, who I was still madly in LOVE with. She pretty much hated my guts, but we had two kids together, and I managed to work my way back into her life.
Meanwhile, I was still living in Chicago and I left the girlfriend and moved in with a friend that I met at the gym. He had a real nice place and even had a pet wolf and we partied and womanized a lot.
Fast forward a couple years and I moved back home and got back together with my ex and we move back in together and eventually remarried. I got work in the plants as a safety man because of my experience and not long after that I finish my degree and became a certified industrial hygienist and certified safety professional. Soon after I began working as a government contractor. I even did work in places like Los Alamos Labs, Brookhaven labs, Nellis AFB and even a guided tour of the Hanover nuclear facility. My employer, had me doing specialty projects like behavioral safety and human performance improvement, which is why I spent time with those different national labs. Nothing super secret or especially high profile. Just really interesting.
I was also primary corporate safety and health contact for a couple of our gulf coast facilities. There was a fatality at one Sute, of a subcontractor employee, which led to a lot of attention from Washington, a real pain in the arse. Not long after that one of the Prime Contractor employees retired and took a part time job as a subcontractor on my site mowing grass. Turns out he decided one day during lunch to jump on a zero turn mower which he was not trained on and found himself under a pipe rack, which broke his neck. This resulted in him dying and another fatality, on “MY” Site!
So with all that going on, I decided in 2016 it was a good time to retire.
So now I’m doing my dream “job” of mowing grass with my nice Skag mower (for free mostly), and doing hobbies in my new studio shop.
Two fine sons and a grand daughter and a Wife of over 40 years, if you don’t count the crazy times.
So there you go OT. My crazy AZZ life story, (condensed version).

ETA; northshorebamaman

You can't imagine how inspirational it was to read your post because I am currently in a similar situation now as you were then. Maybe paying for all those sins.

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And then one day, I was sitting on the couch, perusing the OT as usual, and I just decided "frick this, I'm taking a walk." Walker and all, I struggled to get outside and just told myself to make it around my building.

A couple of weeks worth of daily walks later and I started looping the block. The walker is replaced with a cane.

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I have taken this to heart and plan to try and follow your lead. I am still too young, with too many blessings to give up now.

Thank you!!

Choosing Harvard over Yale because I didn’t like bow ties & Connecticut changed my life.

I call these fork in the road moments

Took a summer job while in college at the encouragement of my, at the time, girlfriend. Led to a career with the connections made that summer, a career I never would have even considered while in college.

I was looking for a job in my early twenties after graduating. I went to the newly formed LSU career center, and the lady told me that with a history degree my best bet was a job with the state. She gave me a list of tests to take, and one of them was for a computer programmer position. I took four tests; the day before the computer test, I decided not to go thinking I wasn’t prepared for it. The next morning I changed my mind at the last minute and went. It turned out to be an aptitude test, and I scored a 97/100. I became a computer programmer and met my future husband 6 months later. I would probably never have met him otherwise. We’ve been married for 37 years and have four grown children.

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northshorebamaman

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My brother from another mother.