Dale Mello:  

After College I worked for a year at New England College and ran a co-ed dorm. I then moved to Washington, DC from 1977-June of 1981. I was the manager of an Oriental Rug Store in Old Town Alexandria VA called Alexandria's Rugtime Stand. After four years in retail, I decided the time was right to get out of retail which took up every holiday and weekend. I moved back to Wappingers Falls, enrolled at Pace University to work on my Master's in Computer Science and got a job in administration at IBM Divisional Headquarters to support myself. Once settled, I rented an apartment in Westchester County and lived their from June 1981 through August 1984. While at IBM I pursued a career in the field as a systems engineer. In 1984, I took a job in Los Angeles CA as a systems engineer in the IBM branch office that covered the Aerospace Technology Customers. I did my year long training for selling and supporting and did a one year stint as a systems engineer before moving into straight sales for our large customer set. I have had a really fun careet and have now worked for IBM for 29 + years. I was very lucky in the early 90's to survive all of the layoffs that happened within IBM during the next four to six years. I then became focused on IBM's storage system hardware and had an LA territory that covered many large accounts in the Aerospace, Car Company (Toyota, Honda, Nissan etc) and ADP. I got married in Dec of 1992. At our last reunion I think I had won the prize for having the youngest child in the class. He was born in May 1995. He just entered the 10th grade and I have had many benefits from being an "older" mom. While many of you are entering the fun grandparent years......I need some sympathy as I start to panic that he is anxious to get his driving permit next May. I am only partially stupid in his eyes so I have not lost all of my brains yet. I think being a mom is the most fun job in the world. My work accomplishments pale in comparison. I got divorced last year and have the unfortunate circumstance to pay him alimony so I have to watch my pennies until Daniel gets out of high school. We were able to buy out the house so we did not need to make any changes there. We moved back to CT in 2000. I toold an IBM Storage Specialist job covering Aetna and some of the other Insurance accounts. I wanted to come back East cause my parents, who moved to Enfield CT in 1996 were starting to have physical problems and I could not help them much from CA. So after 16 years in Los Angeles that I loved, we came back to the country.......we live in Sandy Hook, CT which is slighly NE from Danbury. In September of 2002 I had a ruptured intestine. I thought I had food poisoning and did not go to the hospital until the next morning. By then my abdimon was all full of poison, and I was dang lucky that the Dr. on call was a very experienced surgeon. After a long two week hospital stay I went home for another six weeks. I returned to work in December and then in January I had to go back to have another surgery to remove more of the large intestine. Because of that second surgery and testing that I went through, I was diagnosed with Stage 3 Breast Cancer in February 2003. I went to Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Sloan Kettering would have been fine but were not covered by my health insurance. Dana Farber was fabulous. I had an excellend surgeon and oncologist. I had three tumors removed as well as had a centinel node...Expand for more