Camel from Kyzylkum

IT WAS THE SPRING OF 1998. I still hoped to land a job in the IT industry. My friend, Lenny, had just moved to the Washington, D.C. area, and she said to me, “Come over. You might find a job here. You can stay with me while looking for a job.” First, it felt like an impossible task: leave everything that was familiar in Buffalo and move to the unknown again. But events in my personal life propelled me to make a quick decision. I started the preparations for moving and also started a job hunt around the Washington, D.C. area, sending out my resume for jobs advertised in the newspapers or online. There were plenty of jobs around the Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland corridor. I even got some feedback. One day, when I was ready, I hopped into my Toyota Corolla and drove to Washington, D.C. It was the first time I had to drive alone for such a long distance—around 400 miles. Smartphones with navigation systems were not yet known. I used a map, but I still got lost a few times. It was stressful, but I made it. Lenny was kind enough to give me one bedroom with a bathroom in her two-bedroom, two-bath apartment in the northwest part of the city. While I was looking for a computer programmer job, I got a job in a department store, where the hours were flexible, and it gave me the possibility to make some money.

After two months of job hunting and countless interviews, I got three job offers. I accepted the offer for the position of computer programmer/analyst from a company in Maryland. It was called “The Emmes Corporation”. Emmes is a Hebrew word; it means truth. Emmes Corporation was (and still is) a company that provides clinical research and biostatistical services, infrastructure, and professional support for successful clinical research around the world. When I was hired in the summer of 1998, it was a small company with fewer than 100 employees. When I retired from this company seventeen-and-a-half years later, it was a mid-size company with around 800 employees.

I rented my own apartment as soon as I started my new job. It was a brand new one-bedroom in the Rio Center in Gaithersburg, Maryland, a very nice area with a man-made lake to walk around, a shopping area, and restaurants. It didn’t hurt that it was in close proximity to my workplace. I was so happy to have a place to call home again.

I moved to my apartment from Lenny’s on a Saturday and got busy unpacking and arranging my things there. I parked my car in a designated parking space in the parking lot. Even though I was given a parking permit hang tag, I was so busy that I forgot to hang it in my car. Around midnight I heard some strange noise in the parking lot—my apartment was on the first floor of the building. I remember thinking to myself, “What is going on in there?” A few minutes later, I looked out of my window and to my surprise did not see my car where I had left it in the parking lot. I thought, “So many years I lived in Buffalo and this never happened to me. The first night I spent in Maryland, my car disappeared.”

In distress, I went outside, hoping maybe someone had seen what had happened with my car. There was a woman outside, and I asked her if she had seen my car. She told me that one car had just been towed away because it had a New York license plate and no parking permit tag. I immediately realized that it must have been my car being towed and that was the noise I’d heard. They were pretty strict with violations there because across from our apartment building was a movie theater and people tried to use our parking spaces while going to watch a movie. The woman was kind enough to give me the phone of the car towing company. Early in the morning I called there and frantically tried to explain to the guy who picked up the phone that I just moved here, that I lived in the apartment, and that I really needed my car back. In response I heard, “Ma’am, you can come and pick up your car if you pay $700.” So I did. It was a very traumatic prelude to my new beginning—in all my years in the United States, I had never had a driving ticket or had my car towed away from me before.