Virgil LaFerney:  

Hello everyone... Well, my goodness. Where to start? Now that I've hit the bix SIX OH (I'm throwing up just typing that number), and thinking back about living in Fort Worth with my parents in the 50's seems way too far back to make much sense. To make matters worse, at that point I still had the '60's to deal with. Yikes... My parents both worked for Southwestern Bell and they were transferred from Fort Worth to Lubbock in 1958. I was fortunate to attend Lubbock Christian High School and while there met some really great people. Wish so much we all could have stayed more in touch but for some reason that just never happened. I don't think many of them realized how much I treasured their friendship. Sooo, in 1964 my parents were transferred back to the Dallas/FtWorth area. Lucky for me my parents decided to live in the Mid-Cities area thus I was able to attend FtWorth Christian High School. Great school, great friends and in all honesty, those were the best days of my life (seems Bryan Adams wrote a song about that many moons ago). I graduated in '67 and then decided to go to college for what seemed like the rest of my life. I ended up attending Forth Worth Christian College, Tarrant County College and Texas Wesleyan University, obtaining 3 different degrees for which I'm thankful. Along the way I met my wife Linda in '71 and married her in '72. Amazingly, she has put up with me for over 35 years. Linda was Sr. Director of Purchasing for Wyndham Hotels for 15 years and most recently is in the same position with OMNI Hotels so we get to travel a bunch. We have one daughter, Amanda, who just this past year received her bachelors degree in elementary education from the University of North Texas in Denton. Life has been good... As for as my work career, dang, I began working for Southwestern Bell in '73, then transferred to AT&T in '74. I worked for AT&T, primarily dealing with large, complex computer systems for 23 of those 29 years. I really got bitten by anything dealing with IT including operating systems, programming in various languages, becoming a UNIX guru, etc.. If it deals with large scale computers running UNIX, I'm your guy! Great being alive during these times. I took a retirement package from AT&T back in 2002 (not that I wanted to) and then picked up a contract job with AT&T Wireless (at that time no longer officially affliated with AT&T) the same year. I worked several years as a IT UNIX contractor for them and in 2005 landed a full-time job at their National Data Center Operations out in Allen TX. Actually, Cingular purchased AT&T Wireless for $41B several years ago so I've made full circle as I'm now an SBC employee again. Well, no, now SBC has purchased AT&T, Bell South and has merged all of them including Cingular back into the new "AT&T". Now go figure that one out boys and girls. At any rate, the building I work in is one of the largest and most modern data centers I've ever seen and is full of state-of-the-art computers and network systems. Talk about a candy store. Add to that I now also support UN...Expand for more