Tonight should be a big party for me, I’ve always been the party host for New Year’s Eve going back to around 1990. It’s just kind of been my thing. For a long time it was Art and my thing to host New Year’s Eve together. We often did it at his house around 1990 and 1991. This year Josh and I have this great apartment in Greece, New York at Greenleaf Meadows and we are throwing a nice party because we actually have a townhouse to host it in. None of our friends have a “real” place like this so it is a pretty big deal. Andy lives at the house on Cypress St. in Rochester but hangs out all of the time.
I’m writing this update on New Year’s 2020 so a very, very long time later, twenty one years later, in fact. So my memory of the day is pretty lean. But it does stand out.
At this time I was the overnight auditor and manager for the Wellesley Inn (Prime Hospitality) in Brighton, New York on the south side of Rochester. I had been there since leaving the Days Inn, which had been just an awful experience, which I went to after my terrible experience at Tops Markets in Avon, which was after Burger King, which was after Pizza Hut. I had a fast run of weird jobs during this time, but the Wellesley I stayed with for a while as it was a really nice place to work.
Tonight was my night off, I had gotten it off in advance so that we could plan the party at the house. Andy was scheduled to work tonight as I had seniority having moved from the Days Inn to the Wellesley a little while before he did. So Josh and I planned a party at our “new” bachelor pad. This would be our first New Year’s here, I am pretty sure.
My night got ruined, though, because while I got to host the start of the party, Andy ended up getting drunk at work and sent home and they called me in to take over managing the hotel for the night. So I had to leave my own party to go to work, and Andy got to go to my place to go to the party! And I didn’t even get paid for a whole shift. I spent money on the party at my house, did all the work, and didn’t get to enjoy it, and then when I had to work got a short shift because it wasn’t really my shift. It just sucked all the way around. So I told them that in no uncertain terms I was not working the overnight next year.
So a pretty crappy New Year’s Eve night.
One thing that is amazing to think about is that this party was just under two months before Andy and I would form our first company, Renaissance-West Consulting which would eventually be renamed (among other things) NTG and would last for a very long time (still going decades later as I wrote this.) In addition to working at the hotel at night, I was studying like crazy to get my IT certifications like the MCSE, and doing any consulting that I could pick up during the day, and was playing classical guitar on salary for Wegmans as their corporate guitarist which I had been doing for a while at this point and it was going great. I was at a really weird point in my life where my post-high school “floundering” was just weeks away from ending and I was just about to have the kick off to some of the most interesting adventures in my life begin.