Jamie Hankins:  

Most of you probably knew me as Rocky Weaver. My name is now Jamie A. Hankins. Note, I don't recommend trying to get in touch with me on this website. Instead, find me on Facebook. In 1988, I decided that I needed to make a fresh start. I changed my name and moved to Boston, severing any ties to Arkansas. While living in Boston, I worked doing database work for an environmental consulting company. I wrote automated statistical tests for transmission electron microscopy. In 1992, I moved to Seattle. First, I did some computer work for a private investigator. Then, I worked briefly selling home electronics for a local retailer. Afterwards, from 1993 to 1995, I worked for a marketing consulting company. I wound up leaving the marketing company to start my own. I managed to get Microsoft as a client, but had no success signing up other companies. I had three employees, and I had to make the money to pay them, so I got a job as a temporary contractor at Microsoft testing software. I was making good money, but I was having to put all of the money back into my company to pay my employees. Finally, I decided that I'd rather keep the money, so I closed my company and went to work for Microsoft full-time as a developer. In 2001, I contacted my family and started the process of getting reaquainted. Since I left, my grandmother on my father's side and my grandfather on my mother's side passed away. An aunt that was about fifteen years older than me also died. My father has survived two bouts of cancer, first mouth cancer, then lung cancer. As a result, he has had all of one lung and part of the other removed. In 2002, I left Microsoft and accepted an offer from Honeywell to move to the D.C. area and develop software for high-security access-control systems. The software I worked on controls physical access to the U.S. Justice Department, F.B.I. Headquarters, many airports, the U.S. Treasury Department, and my personal favorite, the Ferarri factory in Modena, Italy, among many others. I worked for Honeywell for five years before the monotany of working for a company run by dinosaurs got the best of me. My former manager from Microsoft had left to work for a company in Montana called RightNow Technologies. He talked me into checking them out, and I wound up going out for an interview. Honeywell, meanwhile, offered me a 30% salary increase if I would stay. However, it was time to work on something fun again. In April 2005, I started working for RightNow from my home office here in the D.C. area. The plan was for us to sell our home here and move to Montana. It turns out that for what we could sell our townhome here for, we could buy a mansion in Montana. However, the real-estate market is really depressed here, so we decided to put the move on hold until things improved here. Six weeks before Thanksgiving, 2005, I started having a really bad headache. It persisted, and after a month, I went to see my doctor. After a quick examination, he told me that I had acne on the back of my head, and that was what was causing my headache. I told him that the pain came from inside my skull, but he insisted that he was right. He gave me some anti-biotics that cleared up the acne. Two days before Thanksgiving, we left home to drive to Arkansas to visit my grandmother. Once we were about two hours from home, we stopped for dinner. The pain had become unbearable. The light from oncoming cars felt like a brick hitting me in the head. We went to the emergency room of a local hospital. After waiting for three hours, the hospital ran an uncontrasted CT scan. They declared that it was clear, and that my pai...Expand for more