When I was new to the job market,, I went to work for a place that made custom recording equipment, mixing consoles to be exact, named Flickingers .  My job was in the electronic area that soldered the circuits onto boards. Although the work was a little tedious, and I would sometimes dream all night, unpaid,  about soldering in those components, I nonetheless liked the idea that I was learning about the difference between capacitors, resistors, diodes, etc and how to read the color codings. Understanding circuit boards came in handy when I later went to work for my first of 5 software companies in technical positions. The company also liked me and one of the department heads told me I was to be trained in technical drawing and drafting.  I was pretty excited, felt that I had a good budding future with this company, despite the fact that they had been putting off paying our paychecks for about a month. What the company had been doing was readying a console unit for some famous and popular musicians and expected to pay us after the group took delivery. Some principles from the company, along with engineers,  were going to go deliver and set it up in person. So I went and bought a car. More precisely, I went with my dad and he bought me a car, which I was to make payments for to him. The car was a gorgeous shiny black volkswagon beetle, and I remember driving it home that night so proud that I was about to get ahead in the world.

Drove my car up to work in the morning; it was also payday. One of the first things that happened was that the head of my department gathered us together, told us that the company was declaring bankruptcy, we weren't going to get paid,  and we were all to go home. Years later I found out what had happened.

We'd heard about this one that Sly Stone had made. It was legendary. It was absolutely cursed. When Sly Stone got his desk delivered, it was the day that the company went bankrupt because he was so demanding. He basically had all the people from Flickinger come over and put it in to his house and hook it up and everything. He ended up holding them hostage with guns and everything, not letting them leave. He was trying to make them make it levitate and made them paint it in UV paint so he could see his cocaine on it. He basically drove the people mad. They all had nervous breakdowns and quit. The company went under. It was bankrupt from him. I don't know if he ever paid for it. But they were too frightened to go back there because it was a hostage situation.

Now I drove my car again but downtown to the shop my mom ran to tell her that I had no longer had a job. Over the next couple of weeks, my sister got my new car, for which I had to fight back feelings of jealousy, but it was fair because I didn't have a way to pay for it, and she did. It was also right for my dad not to subsidize me, as I not only intended to be self-supporting but had a deal with my dad that I was to pay him back.

It took quite a while for the bankruptcy to be resolved as it moved through the courts, and I can't remember now if I got my entire back pay or only part. Flickinger had put all the assets into his wife's name. His parents in law owned a circuit board company across the street and I next went to work there, inspecting circuit boards. Had I been waiting on this money to live my life, I would have been in a world of trouble.