Manos said:
When he wants to bring up my social class as an issue, I'm calling him on his.
And he gave you an answer, just not the one you wanted. He's not required to divulge his personal information to satisfy your curiosity, and literally nothing he said would make a difference, if you won't accept his word in the first place. You do it to badger him, because you don't like him, because he said shitty thing about you and being a lawyer. I've seen the whole stupid drama unfold.
You didn't answer first though. Here's a freebie though, I'm an attorney.
I'm Mr. Oversharing, so just remember that you asked for it:
My father was born to a drunken mechanic, who found Jesus after getting his ear cut off and became a circuit rider until he had a stroke standing in a tent, praising Jesus. He was born with an extra bone in both legs and was tugged around by his twin sister in a red wagon until the Shriner's paid to have the extra bones removed. His first job was at 13, repairing appliances. He was entirely self-taught in the art of electronics repair, although his newly minted step-father repaired watches. They were, literally, dirt poor. They had floors of dirt, and my father grew up wearing someone else's clothes. He started working to help feed his family.
He studied hard and attended school, where he met my mother, a polio survivor, and the daughter of second generation Irish immigrants, one who taught school, and the other who worked for the railroads as in inspector. They fell in love and got married while she was going to nursing school, and he attended UT for architecture. Like many young couples, they started a family.
In 1964, the rubella epidemic was sweeping the nation. There were hundreds of thousands of miscarriages, and those babies born with rubella suffered terrible congenital failures. My brother was one of those babies. The high temperature burned up the nerves in his ears in eyes, leaving him legally deaf and blind. He was also born cyanotic, and with a lethal heart murmur. My father dropped out of college and took two jobs to help afford the necessary surgery. The March of Dimes, who made my brother their posterboy that year, helped out considerably.
My mother became a nurse, and my father became a bank teller. From there he became a loan officer, then a bank insurance executive, then a bank president. As bank President, he discovered that the shareholders were using bank money to make fraudulent and dangerous investments. You probably remember this part as the Savings and Loan scandal. In downhome Tennessee it played out with bricks through my father's windows, late night death threats, and a shot fired through his window as he was driving. This is why we came back to Texas, and also marks the beginning of my father's descent into serious alcoholism.
In Texas, he managed to secure a job with a bank because of a fluke. See, he'd been blacklisted. He couldn't work in the industry, because the people who owned the banks didn't like whistleblowers. But this bank, they needed someone who knew something about these new-fangled computers, and my father had overseen one of the first computer system retrofits for his bank in Tennessee. So he became their Data Processing manager. He also sank deeper and deeper into alcoholism. By the end, the bank couldn't keep him in place, and his career as a banker was over at the age of forty-five. He worked a few other jobs, mostly retail, which humiliated him, before giving up and becoming a stay at home husband. My mother, who'd spent the last thirty years having her heart ripped out on a daily basis in the NICU ward, made enough money that she could support them, since us kids had moved out.
So, that's what my father and mother did for a living. They were poor and they were rich and then they were sorta poor again until my father died of cancer.
I spent twenty years as an IT Security specialist before losing my mind. I made $70K my best year. I've also worked as a phone solicitor, programmer, a visual artist, a security guard, an editor, and a comic book writer. I'm currently unemployed, but when I return to work I'll be a paralegal for a family law/personal injury attorney.
Anything else? Any more simplistic questions you think are meaningful? I'm an open book, Manos.
