Everything changes….

Five years ago I moved back near my hometown in California, to take a local imaging sales job for Technical Instruments covering UC Davis. Over those four years I had children, completely changed my job title and territory, and learned more than I could imagine about the many facets of our industry.

This month I was offered an opportunity to move to a startup company, and the opportunity was simply too good to pass up. It, like everything, has risk, but this is one path I must follow to it’s end. So, I thought it would be a fun post to look back at the amazing times I’ve had at Technical Instruments, as it’s been quite a ride!

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I love flying. Working at TI as an application scientist allowed me to exploit my passion for business impact. Why would one ever use an airplane for business? Believe it or not, it’s really not that crazy when you consider the alternatives.

First off, time is money. When you consider that my coverage territory includes Bakersfield to Eureka (a HUGE chunk of land) and most of Nevada, it becomes clear there’s a real estate issue for coverage. The plane gave me the legs to reach places like Eureka in 1.3 hours, which would have taken 5 or so hours to drive. This means no hotel stay, less meals to pay for, more working hours, greater customer response and a better quality of life for me. Everyone wins.

It also means I am one of the few, humbly privileged people, to see the majesty of the sky from a unique perspective. It’s never the same. Day after day I flew similar routes, and yet each day was a new and unique experience. Pictures and video simply cannot do justice to watching the majestic power of a thunderstorm spewing lightning and hail in every direction, to see the color of the sky change around it, to feel true fear for it’s power over life and machine.

Flight gives the pilot access to a time machine. You get in, and in an incredibly short period of time, you’re in LA, or Oregon. It changes how you think about your world, about society, about our environment. There’s something different about looking down on the world. I wish more people could see it!

I made by “bay area base of operations” the San Carlos Airport. 75% of my flights ended up at KSQL. Of course, because this airport is frequently covered in fog, flying could be “interesting”. In the past 4 years of flying I landed at this airport 698 times. Total “operations” (takeoffs and landings) were 1396. Of those flights, they occupied 728.8 hours of flight time, and burned 6,195 gallons of aviation fuel.

My familiarity at the airport has come to the point that I try and guess who’s voice is on the tower comm when I fly in. They know my Tail #, so they say “hi Austin”, but I try to guess, is that Casey? Raul? It’s my morning arrival game that tells me I’m back in town on another work day. After a rough trip in during the winter, there were no sweeter words than “20105, make right base for 30, report the cement plant”. I can’t thank the tower staff enough for working with me on so many days to get me into the IFR traffic flow, to sneak me in on a special VFR arrival, let me fly a short approach, or just to say hi at the end of a long work day when I was taking off to go home.

During my travels I’ve made friends with several people at the airport operations base. It’s going to be weird not having a post work-day talk with the management or ops people on my way out the door. These gracious men and women provided me a blanket of friendship that greatly eased my rather hectic work schedule. I’ll miss the great conversations and debates I had with the wonderful staff at KSQL. I wish them the best as in my opinion, for all the flying I’ve done, San Carlos is the best managed airport in the northern California area. It feels like you are part of a very special and close knit community there, because you are, because they work hard to make this community strong.

I never lost confidence in my venerable cessna. I am considered by my mechanics to be an “engine hypochondriac”, and I looked over this machine as if my life, and the lives of my family depended on it, because this is the stark truth.

So what’s the deal, it looks like all my employer paid me to do was to fly! There’s so much to the story. TI has hands in an extremely diverse market. Microscopes and imaging systems are used in almost every facet of modern production and research. All of these systems need to be serviced, expanded and even custom designed for targeted applications.

Some days I’d be at Stanford or UCSF or UC Berkeley building a system, or training users, or writing code for driving a device. Other days I’d be ferrying parts for service or simply moving equipment.

My job requires a crazy level of chamelion like traits. Sometimes you’re a counselor for a wayward and disenchanted postdoc. Other times you’re simply trying to help someone get to the end of that paper.

Yet on the rare occasion there’s someone super frustrated with the instrument, and you’ve got to work through the emotions to get the job done.