Just over two months ago, I wrote that I was taking a job with Microsoft’s Xbox division. The ensuing 5 weeks ended up being one of the busiest periods of my life. In fact, I think we must have set some sort of record for doing a complete interstate move.
My last day with Reuters was June 20. By June 26, me, my wife and 6-year-old son had packed up and hit the road on the 900-mile drive to Seattle.
I received my Microsoft badge on June 30, just two weeks before the E3 expo in Los Angeles that is the video game industry’s most important show of the year (and which, incidentally, we won hands-down).
We closed on a new house on July 31 and were fully moved in by the evening of August 2.
It really was one of those moves in which everything comes together, A-Team-like. It was about time, since we’d had enough practice. Here is a brief history of our wanderings since the mid-90s:
- April, 1996: Take full-time job with Reuters in Beijing.
- January, 1999: Take job with Reuters in Los Angeles
- February, 2000: Take job with Reuters in Seattle
- May, 2002: Take job with Reuters in Beijing
- October, 2005: Take job with Reuters in San Francisco
- June, 2008: Take job with Microsoft in Seattle
That’s five major moves in less than 10 years. I guess all that practice paid off since pretty much everything went off without a hitch this time.
In a corporate move like this, there are so many moving parts: moving company (and a separate company to move one of our cars), corporate HR for both Reuters and Microsoft, the temp housing company, the real estate agent, the mortgage lender, the home seller, etc. In every case, each party totally went to bat for us to make sure everything went as smoothly as possible. It was amazing.
I don’t have much to report right now. Scratch that, I have tons to report, but I’m not going to do it right at this moment. This is sort of the re-launching of Command-K, and I just needed to log in and get the ball rolling again.
In the coming weeks I’ll be writing about the new job, my evolving perspective on the games industry from the inside and other random thoughts.
