Bill Clinton was President of the United States, the country’s gas prices averaged $1.48 per gallon, and I was 32 years old.

It was August 24th, 2000 and I was starting the first day of my new job as a sales rep at Open Systems Publishing in St. Clair Shores, MI. I was about 2 years removed from working on the other side of the publishing business as a journalist at newspapers for 12 years.

Never in my life did I expect to be writing this blog all these years later celebrating 25 years at the same company. It’s been a job of a lifetime, and now at 57, I’ve literally worked at my company for just about half of my life.

I thank my boss and friend Pat Hopper for taking a chance and hiring me. He stood up as a groomsman in mine and my wife Sue’s wedding on Aug. 31st. 2007. Having kids around the same age, we’ve gone through the trials of raising our young kids into grown adults over the years, sharing stories, and advice, and usually over a cold beer or glass of wine.

I look back on my long career at my company and can honestly say I have never looked for another job since I started here. It always just seemed to be a perfect fit for my career.

Much has happened in the world of technology and at the company since I started a quarter century ago — damn, that sounds like a long time.

We changed from OpenSystems-Publishing to OpenSystems Media in 2007. In a nutshell, we’re a media company covering hardware and software technology, and standards for designers and engineers in the embedded and military embedded industries.

In addition to printing Military Embedded Systems and Embedded Computing Design magazines, we provide our engineering audiences with the information they need to do their jobs in the aerospace, defense, IoT, automotive, industrial, and transportation markets through news articles, blogs, expert commentary, how-to guides, buyer’s guides, webcasts, and live events.

A year after I started, on Sept. 11, 2001, two planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York City, another flew into field in rural Pennsylvania and one struck the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and our nation experienced the country’s worst terror attack.

I remember that day like it was yesterday. I was at our small 1,200-square-foot office on 12 Mile Road in St. Clair Shores, MI, across the street from Lake St. Clair. I was sitting at my desk working on my computer using one of our shared dial-up AOL accounts. Pat was at his desk on the other side of a cloth cubicle divider. Our secretary Karen Layman came in the office at 9 am and told us that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.

For some reason, none of us believed her at first, so i checked out CNN on the computer and watched live coverage just as another plane flew into the building at 9:03 am.

Looking over the years, it’s incredible seeing everything I’ve lived through in the past 25 years. I joined the company when the telecom industry’s Dot-com era was at its peak and just before the crash.

We’re a media company covering the technology industry and it’s bizarre to think that back in 2000, the internet was in its infancy. Google had only started 2 years before I started at the company. If you were going to “surf” the internet, you needed an email address, like one from Hotmail, AOL, Lycos, Netscape, or Yahoo. If you wanted to search for music to download, Pandora, Spotify, and Apple Music weren’t even around. You had to go to a file-sharing site like Napster and download copyrighted songs illegally (I never did it once!).

In the early 2000s, in our Michigan headquarters office, we had 8 employees, including me, Pat, and his dad Mike Hopper, who started the company in the 1980s. We were a close-knit group, celebrating birthdays, holidays, and major events in each others’ lives. We were always all on the same page and we were like a family. It was seriously the greatest place to work.

We were a small office, but we had big ideas. We were young, had a lot of energy, and we moved fast and always in sync. There weren’t hoops to climb through or hurdles to leap if you had a good sales idea for the company. Our small sales team of me, Pat, Dennis Doyle, and Christi Long would get together and decide whether to move forward with the idea or drop it. Not too often would we drop it and it made us a very successful company because we weren’t afraid to be innovative in a fast-moving world of technology.

In the “Great Recession” in 2008-2009 that occurred globally, our company didn’t suffer. Because we became diversified by that point with so many alternative advertising options, our clients were still able to get their message out through our opportunities. Our company survived and grew stronger out of it. Personally, over those 2 years, my sales increased 35%.

We didn’t just print magazines. We created successful e-newsletters, we started an incredibly successful webinar program for clients, we grew our database of subscribers exponentially, we became a digital media force in the industry, and we started offering marketing opportunities that our competitors didn’t do.

I’d like to say it was all me that led our company to success in those years, but it was our entire team and really fell on the shoulders of Pat Hopper. He was, and is, a smart business man, strategic planner, and not afraid to try new programs to increase the company’s revenue.

But, it wasn’t always business, business, business. Our core group was a young staff in our late 20s and early 30s. It was fun and exciting going to the office each day. We’d often have competitions, like the “Beefcake weight-loss” challenge. I think my colleague Andrea Stabile gave it that name. Each Monday, me, Pat, Andrea, and Christi Long would step on a scale in the office, weigh ourselves, and each write our weight on a yellow piece of paper taped to a wall in the office. We’d do this competition for months and months at a time and several times over the years. If you gained a few pounds, there were always excuses about “having one too many” over the weekend. Aside from some teasing about the “Beefcake of the week,” we did it to motivate each other to be healthy.

At lunch or late on a Friday afternoon, Pat and I would often play darts on a cork dart board. Occasionally, Christi and Andrea would join in. The competitions were stiff. I actually created a running Excel file in the games that Pat and I played against each other. It was 3 darts each, one round each, total individual score won the round. I stopped counting at 1,000 rounds, which occurred over about a 4-year period. My total wins were 503. Pat won 497. My average score of 3 darts was 68.8, Pat’s was 68.5. It was a great way to burn off some stress.

There were a lot of shenanigans that took place in the office. The air horns that I brought into the office probably weren’t a good idea, but they provided a lot of laughs especially when one of us would blare one unexpectedly.

My weather radio was a hit as well (in my mind, anyway), especially when severe thunderstorms were approaching. I’d have the cheap, plastic weather radio blaring with the National Weather Service broadcaster announcing the incoming severe weather. Pat was usually annoyed by it, which made me play it even louder and longer. The weather radio met its demise one day when Pat could take it no more as I was played it loudly due to an approaching storm. Pat charged over to my desk, grabbed the weather radio, opened a window and chucked the cheap thing across the front lawn to the sidewalk where it shattered. Not much of a loss because I had bought it at a garage sale for 25 cents. Still, all of us in the office were laughing hysterically.

As our staff grew older we matured and the shenanigans came to a close. Some of our colleagues retired, left for other jobs, and eventually it became just Pat and I in the office for a year. One of our former colleagues, Doug Cordier, during a visit gifted us with a life-sized cardboard figure of Hillary Clinton. Pat and I had a little fun with it, leaving it surreptitiously around a corner in the office to scare each other. It worked many times.

Eventually our St. Clair Shores office closed and the headquarters moved to Fountain Hills, AZ, where our editorial and production staff worked. Pat opened a small office in downtown Grosse Pointe and I now work from my home office in Chesterfield Township, MI. Everyone else in our company also works remotely now throughout the U.S., and Asia.

As a media company over 25 years, we’ve become a force in our niche markets that we cover. On our Military Embedded Systems brand side, run with excellence by company Co-President John McHale, we dominate the coverage and landscape at trade shows covering Special Forces, the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, Unmanned Systems, and Radar and Electronic Warfare. Our advertisers are not just our clients, but our friends. John and I have known many of these people for more than 20 years, had dinners, drinks, and hundreds of hours of conversations.

For over 14 years, John McHale and I have traveled extensively to military trade shows and road trips to see clients. John’s eclectic style of music as we’re driving on the road is awesome, especially the Irish hits. John and I have had thousands of hours of conversations over the years, both business and personal, and I value our friendship.

On our Embedded Computing brand side, it’s the same. We are the leading media company covering the embedded computing space and Pat put us on the map a long time ago. We are the U.S. media sponsor for one of the largest trade shows in the world, Embedded World, and we are media sponsors for various other events.

Some of my friends and colleagues I owe thanks over the years besides Pat to make this the greatest job include John McHale, Rich Nass, Barbara Quinlan, Rebecca Barker, Len Pettek, Steph Sweet, Gina Peter, former colleague Brandon Lewis, my German friend Simon Haas and clients Scott Unzen of Omnetics, Greg Donahue of DDC-I, Mike Slaton of Abaco Systems, Valerie Andrew of Elma Electronics, Noah Donaldson and Barnaby Wickham of Annapolis Micro Systems, Earl Foster of Sealevel Systems, Michele Kasza and Patrick Dietrich of Connect Tech, and countless others who, if all named, would make it a 10,000-word blog.

I have developed lifelong friendships with many of my colleagues as well as clients. Each spring, as part of our participation at Embedded World in Nuremburg, Germany, me, my wife Sue, and a few colleagues travel throughout Europe making lasting memories together. They are unforgettable experiences.

Thanks Pat for taking a chance on me back in August 2000. I can honestly say, it has been the job of a lifetime.