"The Buick"

Wow! Another week! I am closing in on the end of my college career. I really have no regrets here. I have taken advantage of a lot of the opportunities that BYU offers. If there was more time- I definitely would have done even more. One thing on my list was to learn how to speed read, to speak Spanish, and to do a study abroad. But you know what? I've got the rest of my life to do those things. I could technically stay in college forever I suppose, but it's time to move on.

This is a picture of Whitney and I in Houston. That is not the setting for today's story, however. Our story takes place in Provo Utah exactly one year before this picture.

When Whitney and I were married, we kept both of our cars. We didn't insure Whitney's car but just had it sit for awhile, as we drove "The Buick." "The Buick" was a big boat of a car that my parents gave me when I returned from my LDS mission. The car meant a lot to us as a couple because it was part of our courtship at BYU. Not only did we have our first kiss there (front seat people, front seat), we also drove that car to the red woods in California for our honeymoon. It represented a lot of great memories.

As we neared one year of marriage, we saw that we really didn't need two cars. We decided to keep Whit's Nissan Altima and get rid of "The Buick." I put an ad on KSL and Craig's List at a little above the blue book price.

People came by and were very skeptical of the price. If we would have accepted the offer, we would have ultimately made more money than we did 2 months later. But I was hard-nosed. I barely came down for anyone. Eventually we got tired of showing it to people. In addition, the car began self destruct. The computer panel blanked out so that people couldn't see the air conditioning and radio information. The cost to fix the panel was more than the value of the car. The seat belts in the back seat broke. I could tell that this beloved car didn't want to leave me.

I finally dropped the price to half of what I originally offered. A Finnish man came and looked at the car and really liked it. He had just bought a lemon and was not very happy about it. After some negotiation, we determined a price for "The Buick" and I signed over the title.

As I walked away from the car with my cash in hand. I heard the Finnish man try to start the car. It didn't start. I was making a crazy sound in fact. I ran back to see if everything was okay. We thought that the car must have just run out of gas. I ran to get a gas can from a neighbor and drove with the Finn to get some gas. We filled up the car as best we could and it still wouldn't start. I was pretty low. I offered him his money back and we scratched out his name on the title.

I had the car towed to the shop and found out that everything should be okay but that there could be one very expensive repair that might need to be done. The car ran fine for the next two weeks, and I eventually did sell the car.

In life we sometimes sell "The Buick" only to have it not start as we walk away. We could wash our hands of what is done. I had legally sold that car and had the right to walk away. I was so disappointed that I still had this crummy, self-destructing-before-my-eyes car. At the same time, I knew that as a man and as a decent human being I couldn't let this Finn sit there with his awesome new car.

Optimism in many ways is like hope. Even if this experience was going to ruin my day and require me to do a lot more work over the next few weeks, I knew that the car would sell eventually. I was optimistic that this tragedy would eventually become a story I could laugh about...and I do. There's always time to be optimistic, and in the end optimism births more time and more help from those around you. The hope that things will get better is always stronger than the mire we find ourselves stuck in.

Optimism Exported.
Joe Hardie

El Paso in Houson

I've mentioned my friend Nate before. He is my good friend who moved to Hawaii to do his doctorate in nutrition. He is always saying that he needs me to export more optimism, so I feel that he really has kept this blog going even when I abandoned it for a few months. He and his wife Deb came down to Houston to visit Whitney and I when I was working for El Paso Oil last summer. This is a picture of Nate and I at a Cajun BBQ at Whit's family's house.
El Paso Oil was a great experience for me. It solidified in my mind that HR is definitely the career I want to pursue at this point in my life. I learned a lot from day one. In fact, "day one"is the topic of the day.

The first day on the job, you obviously want to make a good impression. Midway through, I thought I was doing pretty well. There were 2 other HR interns, Ashley and Clair, and we were all in the same boat. Rob, the recruiter, took us around to every single office on the 28th floor to introduce us to all the corporate HR employees. After about 10 people, I totally lost track of who was who and who did what.

Later in the day, we went to a Hurricane preparedness training. I was a little shocked that I was in hurricane country, growing up in the corn fields of the midwest and all. I sat down next to a woman and joked about my unfamiliarity with hurricanes. She laughed and joked back. I didn't recognize her so I introduced myself and stuck my hand out. Her eyes narrowed a tad and she simply said, "We met this morning."

Whoa. Hand retracted. Conversation over. We didn't really talk much the rest of the seminar. I found out a few days later that this woman was the VP of HR (Sue Ortenstone), and that I, the lowly intern, would have to work with her one-on-one in one of my projects.

I decided to forget our second meeting (I had obviously already forgotten our first meeting). I went to her office on the appointed day and we had a great conversation. She took a lot of time to get to know me and learn about BYU and my family.

It turns out that names are very important to Sue. She had started in "Big Oil" back when there were NO women in the industry. She graduated in petroleum engineering and worked on an off-shore rig where she had to work her tail of to gain the respect she should have equally received like the males. Through time, Sue took positions that led her to be CEO of an oil company in Austraila. She became a leader known for remembering names and details about people and leveraging her relationships to get ahead.

I still keep in touch with Sue even though I was just an intern and no long work at El Paso. I found out that she was a good lady- but a busy one. One that has a lot on her plate and has bad days just like all of us.

I think that part of optimism is looking past the negative experiences we have with people. One bad encounter sometimes ruins relationships, jobs, families, etc. At times I think that we just have to pretend it didn't happen. Now that may seem like I'm comparing optimism to ignorance or stupidity. Its not that at all. It's forgiveness. It's gratitude. Part of enjoying life to the fullest is choosing what you want to dwell on. I choose the good. I choose the best.

Optimism exported.
Joe Hardie

Lesson's from an Ex-con

Whitney and I attended the Valentine's dance at the LDS Church that we attend. We were in charge of music, so of course there were plenty of hip-hop songs so we could get our groove on.

Many of the life lesson's I've learned have come from working. During the summer of 2007 I worked for Magleby's Custom Homes with my friend Merrill Madsen. In the end we both determined that construction wasn't for us, but that's another story for another blog post. Each day we would drive up to Wolf Creek Mountain by Heber, UT and work for 8-9 hours. The drive was about an hour and arrived each day on site at 7:00am. Merrill and I were not framers, in fact it seemed that many days we weren't allowed to even pick up a hammer. I was what's know as a "gofer." Or I was the one that was told "Go fer that wood over there," or "Go fer that sledge hammer in trailer." Having owned my own business and worked hard most of my life, I struggled with my new role.

To understand this story it is important to understand the amount of money the land owner had. This man had paid over $20 million for the lot alone, at the very top of the mountain. It was so high up that the construction team was struggling to get the water pumps to work properly because of the change in pressure. This lot would include a home, a care-taker's home (bigger than most the homes I grew up in), a barn, a yurt, a man-made lake, a baseball field, and a snowmobile trail through the woods. Along with these amenities, Russ Taylor, the manager of this job, had talked the owner into building a jeep trail.

Now most jeep trails are made naturally by vehicles traveling over grass so much that two ruts are formed a little wider than a tire width wide. This jeep trail, however, would be fabricated. Before we could put fresh dirt down and seed the middle of the trail, we dug down 2-3 feet to put down varying levels of rock. This rock was sifted from the property itself by a large machine. The sifting machine did not sift out wood and sticks very well, as they most likely seem much like rocks to a sifter.

This jeep trail, 1 foot into the ground, is the setting of my story. Merrill and I had been assigned to pick sticks and wood chunks out of the rocks for 2 days. That's 16 hours of leaning over 50 yards of rocks, sitting on rocks, kneeling on rocks, and hand sifting through rocks to find any wood pieces. The reasoning was that the pieces of wood would disintegrate and cause dips in the jeep trail. I highly doubted that a few sticks here or there would make a difference in the more than two feet of varying sizes of rock in the long run. After two days of working on this jeep trail, I was bored out of my mind and loosing patience with my job.

On day 3, my superiors determined that they wouldn't have work for Merrill and I until later in the day. They once more sent us to the jeep trail to pick out wood. I was upset to say the least. I felt like I could do millions of other jobs besides construction where people would respect my talents and where I could do useful work. As I sat on the pointy rocks in my all-but-worn-out work jeans, some of the excavation guys came over to talk to us. The head excavator hadn't been on site for about 2 weeks because he had been in prison. This didn't really surprise me when I had heard. I knew his lifestyle would eventually lead to incarceration for some extent of time, and that he had already previously served time. For our purposes, we'll call him the "ex-con."

The ex-con came up and immediately started telling us about prison and what it was like this time. I didn't join in the conversation, not having a whole lot of experience with the topic, and also not really wanting to talk or smile for that matter. The ex-con noticed my unusual silence and he said,
"How's the jeep trail com'n?"
"It's okay. I'm kind of tired of picking out sticks though. We've been at it two days."
"Easy money man! That's a sweet job."
I noticeably grimaced. He saw my grimace and fixed his eyes on me with cold stare. He proceeded to cuss me out. He called me every name in the book for thinking I was above the work and for being such a sourpuss. I immediately picked my head up and smiled to show him I wasn't above picking up sticks and to get in his good graces again. But in my head, I still hated the work.

Today I think about that story and immediately think of a time when a little more optimism would have helped me out a lot. The ex-con may have gone about it differently than most people I've worked with in life, but he taught me to enjoy what I do and do it well. I'm not saying that we should all go after "easy money," because I don't think that's exactly what Mr. Ex-Con meant. I feel like he was saying that I should make the best of every situation. If all you can do is pick up sticks, do it in a way so that no one can ever doubt who you are or how hard you can work.

I don't know what happened to this excavator, but I do know that I won't soon forget the lesson he taught me in his rough language about being optimistic in any job is required of me.

Optimism Exported.