Fred Downing:
CLASS OF 1987
Walker High SchoolClass of 1987
Walker, LA
Fred's Story
Life
Been a long strange trip. Bailed out of college the second semester after high school and bebopped around the South for a few years before realizing that algebra really wasn't as difficult as throwing 100 pound sacks of dry chemicals in a warehouse 5 days a week. So, I went to SouthEastern and got the maths out of the way and then went back to LSU for the rest. Finally got my BA in English in 1998 and moved to Atlanta the day after taking my last final. Moved in with a stripper living in Atlanta that I'd gotten friendly with over the internet the previous year....friends only, though I kind of regret that sometimes :). She was a fascinating individual and very atypical for the ladies one generally runs into in that industry. She was young and beautiful and wanted to see the world while she was still young and beautiful. So, she worked as a travel agent during the day to get access to great travel deals and worked as a stripper in the evenings to get the money to use the deals. I don't think I've ever encountered another person who knew so clearly what she wanted from life and went for it with such zeal. Anyway, the living arrangement worked out well for both of us. I took a job in help desk hell trouble shooting database design issues within my first week in Atlanta and stayed with that for 9 months, before taking a position at the Centers for Disease Control doing database design work--just in time to avoid getting squashed in the dot com collapse. Stayed there for about 9 months before finally agreeing to take a position with a physician's group in Chicago that I'd been doing projects for off and on for the previous 6 months. That lasted 14 months and two VERY cold winters before I finally had enough of the concrete, rusty steel, lack of parking and inner city hospital emergency rooms wher...Expand for more
e I spent most of my time and headed back to Atlanta. I'd kept in touch with my friends at the CDC and they offered me another position when I got back to Atlanta, so I spent the next four years doing that and really enjoying the work...but not loving the pay so much. When the physician's group called to ask me to come back to work for them and said I could stay in Atlanta and do it remotely, I decided I could live with that. So I bought a place up in the north GA mountains and started working from home and commuting into Chicago or client hospitals around the country as the need arose. I met my partner in one of the hospitals up in CT on one of those trips. After meeting her, I decided I'd had enough of airports, 72 hour shifts in emergency rooms where the staff was inevitably not very enthusiastic and often down right hostile about having to document on a computer. That and constantly being on call finally led me back to the CDC fulltime. There's a lot to be said for not burning bridges! It's all good. I love the work I do and the nature of the work that the CDC engages in. It'd be better if there weren't so many presidential appointments at the highest levels, but what are you going to do? Anyway, now I make the 140 mile round trip commute into Atlanta 3 days a week. My superiors were good enough to let me work from home (where ever that may be) 2 days a week, so I'm able to spend 4 days every other week in CT....you gotta love AirTran. My partner fell in love with the mountains after her first trip down, which was very fortunate, since she can be an ER nurse anywhere where as I can only work for the CDC in Atlanta. And now we're looking for a house in the area where I currently live. It's been a remarkably good life so far...much better than I ever expected it to be. Funny how that works out.
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