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I keep getting email from old friends who ask variations of "How did you end up in Texas? I thought you never were going to leave San Francisco".
Since I keep typing the same message, I thought I'd better put it on the net.
Yes, I used to be a Northern California bigot; I admit it. I couldn't see why anybody would want to live anywhere else. Of course, the only "anywhere else" that I'd spent time in was Southern California, and it's easy to dislike LA.
Well, as usually happens in these situations, I got an offer that I couldn't refuse. In my case, it came up when I finished school and was offered what I felt was the ideal job in Cambridge, MA working for Symbolics. The job allowed me to do interesting things working with interesting people and they offered more money than any of the other possibilities, so I took it.
I spent two years there having the time of my life. It really was a great job. I discovered that there really were other livable places in the world. I did get homesick, but it was worth it. Eventually, the AI boom turned into an AI bust, and Symbolics started having problems and the homesickness for SF and the cold winters became stronger than the advantages of the job, so I returned to California to work for Schlumberger.
I was glad to be back in my home town although I had a 45 minute commute to get to Palo Alto every day. Again, I was having a good time, and now I was out of the snow belt and still having fun doing interesting work.
This time it took only a year and a half before everything changed: Schlumberger decided to shut down their operations in Palo Alto and offer us all jobs in Austin. My first reaction was "Austin Texas, are you crazy???"
However, they really wanted us to make this move, so they sweetened the pot a lot. We were offered a move bonus of 10% of our salary. They were willing to pay up to 3 points on buying a house. The offered decent raises (mine was 10%, and this was just months after my last 10% raise). They pointed out that there was no state income tax in Texas, effectively doubling that raise. They pointed out that the cost of living was much lower. They rented limos to take us to the airport to visit Austin and check it out.
I was still skeptical, but it seemed worth checking out. Since my job would have been to set up the computing environment for the new lab, I got one of the first trips to Austin to scope things out. I arrived in November and the weather was beautiful. The Schlumberger building was very nice and located on 330 acres in the hills surrounded by attractive countryside and nothing else. I'd heard about the music scene and Antone's lived up to it's reputation. I noticed a difference between San Francisco and Austin: When you're in SF and an attractive woman walks by, if you look at her, she averts her eyes and walks by quickly as if she thinks you might be a rapist or something; in Austin, if you look at an attractive woman walking by, she makes eye contact, smiles, and says "Hi" in a gentle Texas drawl.
I was getting more tempted all the time. Finally, I was standing on the footbridge between what would be my building and the other four buildings on the campus watching an Armadillo waddle through the creekbottom below me when I decided that I might be able to stand this for a few years. It certainly didn't seem much worse than Boston; the only real flaw that I could see was that I'd never lived outside a port city. I returned and became the second person to commit to making the move. (Third if you count the Lab Director.)
That was at the start of 1989; I've been here ever since. Amazingly enough, I didn't have as much homesickness as I did in Boston. I've made wonderful friends; the women are wonderful (I seem to even found one who I might be able to stick with); there's great music everywhere all the time.
When I've gone back to SF in recent years, it hasn't seemed the same. The city gets dirtier and more dangerous. Even when I left it was already overrun with New Yorkers. In the years since I moved here, my father has passed away; both my mother and my sister have moved to Oregon; my brother is in school in San Luis Obispo. I no longer have a family there. On my last visit to the West coast, I never got any further south than Humboldt County. SF is no longer home; Austin is.
And so it goes...
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