I saw the movie 'Julie and Julia' in snippets. I remember it as a movie where a lady Julie fascinated with the cooking and life of Julia Child, wanted to recreate 500+ recipes from Julia Child in a year. To me what I remember the most was thinking that probably Julie had not ever met Julia Child, yet the great cook managed to influence the life of Julie. One never realizes whose life we might touch or how we are touched by other's life. I would like to think a similar incident happened in my life. Now some of my deductions might be deductions that I have no factual basis, but I guess it would fall under reasonable deductions.
Some background: In 2013 our family bought a house upgrading from older 3 bedroom 2 bathroom place. The buying of the new house was a roller coaster ride. Each day during the buying process would start with optimism that we would get the house, by afternoon a problem would rear its head, evening would be spent in thinking the deal is gone, and by night (after some consultation) we would come up with a workaround. This process repeated for several days. I intend to describe only one part of the ride.
After our bid got accepted by the seller we had to arrange for the loan. The bid price was based on our estimation that we can come up with 20% of sale price in cash for down payment. We applied for loan on that basis. We had hit our absolute limit in coming up with the 20% as cash. The loan process has a step where valuation of the property is done by an independent entity for the bank. The price we had bid for the house, we were absolutely confident of raising the loan. And then the surprise came in. The independent evaluation came in $100K less than our calculations. What it meant was that either we come up with $100K more cash or let go of the house.
The house we bid on needed renovation. It was located in an area where we felt the price offer was competitive. But there was no getting around the fact that we had difficult choices to make. So we started trying to figure out a solution. Husband's 401K was ruled out because he had recently moved jobs and not immediately accessible. I could take a loan out of my 401K for the max of $50K. Husband figured he can part with some shares earlier than he intended to raise $20K. And there was a chasm of $30K staring at us, keeping us from reaching our home. Amazingly I remembered about the bunch of shares I got as part of joining Tandem. I had completely forgotten about it (1) It was a modest 100 shares granted and (2) I had forgotten to vest my valuable 1200 shares while I was busy delivering my daughter, and this made me erase anything about shares from Tandem from my brain.
t took me a few hours of detective work to trace them and amazingly they yielded the $30K we needed. And we jumped over this hurdle. To me out of this what stood out was the fact that Tandem's amazing business sense that they needed to share the ownership among the employees was what allowed me to this day buy the house. I joined Tandem Computers in March of 1997. While I saw the truly great place it was, I always had the sense I missed the ride and just caught the tail of the wave. Yet it seemed like what a great wave it must have been. Many, many years later sitting in Google cafeteria I had the sense of deja vu . It had the same energy that I used to feel in my early days at Tandem.
Present: Over the winter break visiting Cancun I had taken with me the book "Let It Go" by Dame Stephanie Shirley. What an amazing life and book! In her drive to live everyday a life worth saving she has touched so many lives. In her career she was a member of the board of directors for Tandem Computers. My conjecture on that was that someone must have ideology similar to hers at Tandem Computers. They must have recruited her and she would have influenced the same sharing of ownership among employees which she had incorporated in her company. And it touched my life in a meaningful way in 2013 - my 'Julie and Julia' moment.