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This being my first essay on this site, I wanted to attempt to get back to the basic principle for why I put this together. I have already stated my exact reason for not paying any reparations. Yet despite that, there will be attempts to claim that my wealth is not truly mine, and that I have "institutional racism" to thank for it.

I'm not really all that crazy about going too much into my personal life in this forum. However, it seems that in order to make my point I'll need to do just that. Cue music, please....

I don't want to say exactly what day it was that it happened, but there was a day not all that long ago when I realized that I had pretty much hit rock bottom: I had the clothes on my back, an apartment that I was constantly falling behind on in rent, one total friend (whose finances were only a bit better than mine), ... really, for all intents and purposes, I was at zero.

In talking about what happened next, it's important for me to point out that I recognize that pulling yourself out of the basement is far easier said than done. I had previously spent a year and a half attempting it, and running into walls each time. I lose track now of how many jobs I worked in that time. At one point I was working two jobs, thinking that things would turn around, then got laid off of one, and fired from the other for a dumb mistake of mine. So I do recognize that there are times when it seems like there is no way out. At the same time, I know that every time I've ever thought that, I've later stood corrected.

One day, tired of endless poverty, I decided that next day, somehow or another, I was getting a job. I got up at 7AM, left my apartment, and didn't let myself come back home until I had walked through every local business district and put my name into every place I could see that was hiring.

After a full day of it I thought of one last place I should check. It was a Uni*Mart, a convenience store in Wilkinsburg, a suburb city of Pittsburgh, where I lived. Uni*Mart is what I had been fired from, but it was 6 months later, so I thought maybe I should check to see if I couldn't get a second chance. I did. One week later I started there.

I worked at this job for about a year and a half, being transferred twice. Eventually I was transferred to a store that was so far away that I was often paying as much money to work there as I was getting paid, forcing me to find new employment.

I left that job in the summer of '94, and soon with the extra cash that I had saved I returned to school, while finding a new job working at a coffeehouse nearby. However, I should stop here. There is more that happened afterwards, but my Uni*Mart job is the one that requires more attention than anything else. Despite the fact that I was never paid more than $5.00/hour there, it was the job most responsible for the wealth that I have now, and thus the focus of this story.

You know all of those "When I was your age" lines that have become comically cliche at this point? Well, as tiresome as they are, I'm afraid you're going to have to suffer through another round of it here. Yup, I really did walk miles in the snow to get to work: 4.5 miles one-way at the first store that I worked, and then 3 miles one-way at the second (the third store could only really be reached by two busses, one-hour ride time minimum). And the "walking in the snow" part? It wasn't just any snow: the winters of 1993 and 1994 were two of the harshest in history.

In 1993, I wound up working a 25.5 hour shift as a 28-inch blizzard kept anyone from relieving me, and since we were the only store open for miles, it was 25.5 hours of a non-stop barrage in which I estimate that I waited on 5,000 customers (and really rude customers at that). Then the next year, the lowest ever temperates were recorded on a night in which I was walking home from work, reaching -16F by the time I arrived home. And these were only two days. Yes, I know how typical it sounds to talk about this, and I don't care. It's true, and it's important to the topic of why I won't pay reparations now.

What's also important are the hours that I worked there. Besides that 25.5 hour shift, I also at one point worked for 22 straight days, at another put 164 hours into a 2-week paycheck, and at one other point stayed up for three straight days into order to fill my shifts. I worked long, long hours at this job.

Oh, and there was one other factor that I haven't mentioned. I was, when I started this job, a 21-year old white boy working in Wilkinsburg, a heavily black town, especially in the section that I worked. Also when I started there in 1993, gang warfare was peaking in this area, and the job of convenience store worker was measured to be the most dangerous job in the country, above policeman. As a result, the shift that I wound up generally working was weekend nights, since that was the shift they had the hardest time filling.

And yes, I was held up there once. No one was hurt. But I'll get back to this later. The above pretty well describes my experiences there, so let me get back to what happened next, and I'll explain in a bit why I gave all this detail.

In 1994 I returned to college in hopes of finishing the degree I started previously, while also working at a local coffeeshop (the Beehive, for those of you who know Pittsburgh). This was also not short of challenges, though this was a good deal more bearable, not in the least because I was finally meeting people.

One of the people that I met was a person named Kevin Martin. I knew him through pinball, as we were both champion-level players. He had moved to Pittsburgh not long before, and was starting his own company, and needed a first worker to get the company off the ground. Despite the fact that I really didn't know what was expected of me, I joined up.

The company was pair Networks. We started with no customers. I stayed with the company and still work for them today. We are now one of the largest web hosts in the world, up to more than 111,000 web sites hosted as of this writing. While it's inappropriate for me to discuss my wages in any great detail, I can say honestly that I'm satisfied with my life as its become.

So that's the story. Now, what's the point?

pair was formed by Kevin Martin and Nancee Kumpfmiller. I knew both of them independently through pinball, Nancee through the local league. At this time I was still working at Uni*Mart and was discussing with her what was going on with me. She told me once that she admired how much effort I was putting into improving my life, and that it would some day pay off.

A little more than one year later Kevin, then Nancee's fiance, asks me to work for this new company. Why was I picked? It certainly wasn't for my techincal skills. I had only a bare knowledge of UNIX, and spent the first few months at work with my nose in a book learning as much as I could.

So then what was it? I asked them some time later, and got the answer that I had guessed was true:

They knew that I worked my tail off.

The three years that I spent working two service jobs had paid off. The fact that I was constantly on-time, honest, and hard-working was noticed, and it resulted in the wonderful job that I have today.

And it also resulted in the success that this new company would soon enjoy. pair started off with Kevin and I as the only workers for its first 15 months. When I started, I knew very little UNIX, the operating system used on all of our servers. Yet by the time that we finally hired another employee, pair had already surpassed even our most optmistic expectations. And we continue to go strong today, surviving the dot-com crash with ease.

I don't say any of this to brag. I am very proud of what I've accomplished, it is true, but I'm just as happy to see others reaching their goals as well. No, this is for another reason. This is to show that every dollar in my pocket, every possession in my home, and every account in my name came from my own hands. If I have to be overly dramatic in describing the past to prove it, then fine, there you have it.

I'm sure there will be some who will insist that no matter what I say, there was still an invisible hand that guided me, the chosen race, through traps that blacks could not get through because of "the system". I'm sure then that these people won't much care that, in all of the jobs that I've ever worked, I have never seen a single manager or other decision-maker who cared that a potential hire was black.

I can't do anything about the people who wish to obligate me to their goals, and will simply believe whatever they want to in order to justify it. But for the rest of you, what this all boils down to is this:

I went from having little more than the clothes on my back and nowhere to turn to a life that I am very happy to be living. And what got me here was not any supposed system that only lets whites be successful while keeping blacks and/or others down.

What got me here was my own blood, sweat and tears, and yes, I honestly had plenty of all three of them to get to where I am now. My money, my place, my life is owed to my own hands, which got down into the dirt that other people wouldn't get into (once someone who regularly used food stamps told me that they wouldn't lower themselves to work the job I was working).

This is the first of many writings that I'll be doing on the topic of reparations. However, it was important that I begin my writing by making the point loud and clear to anyone who will attempt to claim otherwise.

My success is due to my own spirit. I am proud of this, and I will not honor claims that it is due to any unfair advantage. It is due to me.