Michael Burr:
CLASS OF 1974
Glacier High SchoolClass of 1974
Seattle, WA
Michael's Story
Some of you may remember me as that tall kid that spent 2/3rds of his senior year in a neck brace after falling off the big front sign at the Lewis & Clark theater and landing on my head - fracturing 5 neck vertebra and getting 49 stitches in the process. Talk about major self-esteem killers... senior year in a neck-brace will sure do it!
While I was laying in the hospital room in traction the week after the accident, lamenting the sudden loss of what little sexual attraction to the babes I thought I might possibly have had, my boss from the theater shows up with a "get well gift".... a whole case of beef jerky from the theater (he was too cheap to buy a real gift). There's just one problem... every tooth in my mouth was loose from my experiment with gravity - (which I can attest works very well). Such it seems was my general luck at that time in my life. Fortunately, I can report that was pretty much the low point and things did indeed get better.
After graduation, I decided to take a year off from studies and work as a clerk at Tradewell. I had been working as a box boy there, so I had an "in" to getting my union card and making some pretty good money for a kid just out of high school. After a year of washing vegetables, and working under an awful manager who thought proper management involved launching into daily tirades, and writing demeaning manifestos on the backs of grocery bags in magic marker, I soon decided I'd be happier in a more "professional" environment and I'd better get my rear back in school. Funny how even the jerks in your life can have a positive impact - thanks Roy!
So, I enrolled in the two-year engineering transfer program at Highline CC. I discovered though as part of my studies there that I had a knack for analytical thinking and writing computer software. I should have realized this earlier, as I was one of those "nerds" from Mr. Andrus's math class that got to carry around a paper punch tape of their "successful" computer program to find quadratic roots - remember those? Oh, what a way to impress the girls... "Whoops, my COMPUTER PROGRAM just accidentally unrolled...". :-)
Anyway, so 1.5 years into the engineering program I changed my major to "Data Processing" and spent another...Expand for more
2 years getting an A.A.S. degree in Comp. Sci. With that, I was able to transfer to Tradewell's I.T. department and say good-bye to my magic-marker manifesto writing boss. I eventually was in charge of the software, installation, and repair of the first bar-code scanning systems for Tradewell Stores and Prairie Market stores.
From there I went on to Children's Hospital, where I developed and maintained the software for the clinical laboratory systems. I met my wife (Kathy) during this period of time at a little pub in the U. District as she was also working in the area at Safeco Insurance as a computer programmer.
I then did a short stent with a small medical software start-up company - but the boss was always on the phone begging for more operating capital from his MOTHER... which didn't give me great confidence in my career path there!. So off I went to Boeing, where I landed a position writing computer graphics software. A group of about 15 of us there wrote the CAD system that Boeing uses to draw all the technical illustrations in their manuals and FAA bulletins. It was a fun job. I spent over 10 years at Boeing - the last of my work there is flying around in the 777 as part of the graphics engine in the "In-Flight Library System". (You can relax... they didn't let me touch any of the flight avionics software... honest).
In 1998, I left Boeing to move to Skagit County and build a house on 7.5 rural acres that I had purchased in the late eighties. It's right on the Bay looking across to Anacortes, it also has a half-acre pond and a couple hundred feet of salt-water beach. I spent a few years doing a lot of the work on the house and land. I then spent 4 years working for the National Park Service, doing website development, and other computer work for North Cascades National Park - which was also a fun job. Nothing like going hiking as part of the job.
Right now, I'm basically a semi-retired "country bumpkin" doing the occasional part-time computer-related contract, and computer-related volunteer work for various organizations, in between feeding chickens, mowing fields, chopping wood, etc.
Oh... and just in case you're wondering... I did eventually eat every piece of that case of beef jerky :-)
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