Sometime in the year 1997 I decided to look for work. This was an unusual and emotional charged decision for me. Since I had graduated from "Gymnasium" (comparable to high school) in Saalfelden, a small town in Austria, I had been self-employed or had my own business, except for temporary jobs and during civil service. For some time I had been trying to find work that pays well and would allow me, based on available vacation, to travel to anywhere in the world I wanted to and attend events with my spiritual teacher. I really wanted to make "serious" money and was willing to work hard for it. This decision eventually greatly influenced my life in many ways. I started learning Visual Basic" online, at that time one of the programming languages that allowed object oriented coding and event controls.

Local jobs in Sandpoint, Idaho, where we live since 1995, in the IT field were rare, so I also looked in the Spokane area. Although I was not at all interested in working for a telemarketing company I went to a job fair of Dakotah Direct (today part of of West Corporation). It had facilities in several states in various locations with about 1500 – 2000 full and part time employees and the same amount of workstations connected through a wide area network (WAN). The “dot com” area was in full swing and programmers in high demand. After passing through the US-corporate hiring process, I started as a programmer/analyst on January 4th, 1998. We were responsible for the software applications used mostly for inbound calling. I was with the company about 4 1/2 years.

After about 2 years I was promoted and became the manager of the "Application Development" department. Until then barley noticed, working concentrated in my cubical, suddenly I now was in charge, held meetings and had to set the agenda. The work consisted of developing software that, based on which phone number a call was received on, prompted the sales associate with the correct screens and scripts, pre-populated with data retrieved from the client’s database. The sales representative was guided through the script and based on the answers and resulting data entries was guided through the whole call. This requires a tight integration between the software, database and telephony system.

The projects were challenging because of the tight schedules, the often unknown details of functionality, last minute changes and the amount of meetings required. Besides the programming and setting up systems, we often did the user training and worked together with the account managers to communicate with the client. Situations could become sometimes very frustrating, when, for example, after a night of work to meet a deadline, it turns out that the start has been postponed for two days, without informing our department.

After 1 1/2 half years as a manager I felt burned out and wanted to quit. Instead, I was offered the same position with one day less of work for the same salary and stayed on. After another year I again felt I needed to leave. This was not what I really wanted to do for the rest of my life, still too stressful, in spite of the good salary, which had made it hard to make up my mind sooner. Then the company got bought by West Corporation and within 2 months we lost about half of the clients in our department caused by decisions of the new owners and management. I gave my notice and May 16th, 2002, was my last day at Dakotah Direct.

During my time at Dakotah I learned to work in a corporate environment, with groups of different people in departments that all have different interests. The sales people are interested in keeping the client happy, no matter what, and earn a good commission. The technical staff tries to keep the project manageable in complexity, time and resource requirements. The officers’ interest is to make a profit for the owners and shareholders and the sales representatives try to keep a positive work attitude in face of a stressful environment and an income dependent on reaching quotas.

I learned about myself that if the level of perceived abuse and exploitation gets beyond a certain limit - I am not willing to just be quiet. At the same time it was hard to voice my concerns appropriately. As a manager I also realized that I always wanted to please everyone and be the "nice guy", sometimes not addressing areas a team member needed improvement in. It was at times quite difficult to balance between the demands of upper management and the needs of the department team and not loose integrity.

It was amazing to see how it was possible for Dakotah Direct to be such a successful company, knowing what happens behind the scenes. It managed to increase growing rapidly, even after the Internet bubble burst and the practice of outsourcing software development to India and other countries became common practice. Customers seemed to like the service we could provide, in spite that the quality of our work could have been much higher. Looking good seemed more important then delivering good work.

It also became clear to me that I do not want to work in an environment that requires long work days for many, makes money for the owners and shareholders, but cuts the benefits for employees where possible and is pretty much oblivious to the social and environmental consequences of the services or products delivered to the client, even though this was not really visible on the surface. In spite of talking about that the employees are the greatest assets of Dakotah Direct, the management was not supporting them to do the best work they could, but trying to squeeze everything out of us in order to please the client and the shareholders. Keeping a straight face and appearing of even temperament in spite of cruel circumstances seemed important to learn in order to be considered for more ”responsibility”.

It is still amazing to me how long after I had quit I still felt responsible – truly a strange feeling – letting go of an attachment that I was so glad to get away from, was at the same time hard indeed. I must have identified myself very much with the work I did. As this was my only long-term employment ever, my whole attitude was not the one of an employee. I felt fully responsible for everything I did, regardless of the circumstances and also for our department, as if this was my own business. That is one of the reasons I pushed myself to the limit of my physical capability and finally my health started to decline. At home during the weekends I rested a lot to recover and putting myself together for going back to work coming Monday. One strong motivation for me to last as long as I did was the goal to ultimately become financially independent, even though what I did was opposite to my passion. And maybe in another 2 – 3 years I would have been close to that. Who knows though, where I would be health wise. This whole experience showed me that a strong emotional decision could motivate for a long time. It showed me that raw determination and commitment can be almost suicide and that even when understanding all this, one still can feel regret of not having achieved a goal. In my case, I wanted to be one step up in the management ladder and retire early.

During my time at Dakotah I attended several trainings: One in a proprietary programming language to create telephony-applications. Another in Oracle 7.2 and PL/SQL, a database system and language and also management training. I felt often stretching to the limit of my skills in project management, programming and working with teams. At the same time I took pride finding solutions that seemed unsolvable with reasonable effort and in delivering flawlessly working software systems, which required often long hours of testing and programming. I saw that I could survive, at least for a while, in such an environment, but that my heart really wants to go for what it is passionate for and not what brings the most financial reward. I understand now much better that I want to follow my passion AND have abundance in my life. I am realizing now, that this time period made it clear to me that I do not want to give up my values and vision for the sake of money and seeming security, but to live my calling to the fullest.