Nestor Torres:  

Life I thought it was about time, that I document a personal chronicle based on recent events that have occurred and changed my goals and perspective on life. During most of my working life I have been very diligent in building a career in the IT corporate world. In so doing I moved up the corporate ladder from being a junior programmer to a project manager and was rewarded with more than a livable package (the golden handcuffs). Unfortunately the world is not the same as it was for our parents whom would normally marry into a company and then retire and live happily ever after, as we were taught to believe. For 30 years of my career I worked mainly on mainframe computer technologies, designing, developing, maintaining and managing large IT projects for one of the largest gold mining operations in the world (Anglogold part of the Anglo American group). As the story goes, at the end of 1999 the mining section of Infogold that I was part of was floated as a separate company (GMSI) and eventually sold to another company called AST. Then in March 2001 I was retrenched from GMSI, the feeling was awful, the excuse being that the company did not require my type of services any longer (high-lighting the saying “if you want loyalty then buy yourself a dog”); I was not bitter towards the GMSI company, just disappointed. This started me off in the contracting world where I worked for Deloitte & Touche and various other corporations as a project manager and sometimes as a senior business analyst; all in all a very rewarding and a educational experience. As Tom Hanks, acting as Forest Gump so eloquently put it “Life is like a box of chocolates you never now what you’re going to get”. But then the crunch came with the impact of 911, the global recession, cost cutting exercises and the day the IT bubble burst. Luckily for me I have always been a frugal individual and have invested in various schemes providing various revenue streams that would be my survival pack through the...Expand for more