Two Lost Jobs, a Ruptured Appendix, and Starting Over

Starting Over After Losing My Job

Starting over after losing my job wasn’t something I expected to become familiar with. When I left Resorts after seven years, I thought I was moving into something bigger. Instead, the next stretch of my life included two lost jobs, a ruptured appendix, surgery, an infection, an FAA contract, and eventually a small RV dealership in South Jersey.

Someone I had previously mentored had called me about an opportunity with GigaOm. The job paid more than $100,000, and the way it was originally described to me sounded heavily security-focused. There was even talk that maybe, eventually, I could lead a security group.

That sounded pretty damn good to me.

At first, it was.

The GigaOm Job I Thought I Was Getting

One of my first major projects was exactly the kind of work I wanted to be doing: a SIEM benchmark based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

I built virtual environments, installed Atomic Red Team tooling from Red Canary, and generated a series of MITRE ATT&CK techniques against the environments. We then compared how those attacks appeared to an analyst using Micro Focus ArcSight, Splunk Enterprise Security, IBM QRadar, and Microsoft Sentinel.

The idea wasn’t simply to ask which SIEM had the longest feature list. We wanted to look at the products from the perspective of someone sitting down as a relatively new analyst and ask a much more practical question: if an attack was happening, which platform made it easier to figure that out?

I loved that project.

It combined security, virtualization, testing, attacking systems, analysis, and writing. Basically everything I enjoy about technology in one project.

GigaOm also did technical benchmarking outside cybersecurity. One example was Microsoft Teams, where we compared versions of Teams across different classes of hardware and measured things like resource utilization, application launch time, and meeting performance.

That work was interesting too.

Then the assignments moved farther and farther away from anything I knew.

Way Outside My Comfort Zone

One project involved Adobe’s customer-experience technology. I don’t remember every product name now, but the platform did things such as identifying abandoned shopping carts, tracking customer activity, and allowing businesses to target those customers with offers.

There was much more to it than that, but that was the world I suddenly found myself testing.

And I had no idea what I was doing.

I’ve dealt with some stressful technical situations during my career, but that project may have been one of the most stressful. This wasn’t like being handed a firewall, SIEM, Windows server, or Linux box and figuring it out. I didn’t have the foundation underneath me that I normally relied on.

Eventually I was fired.

That sucked, especially because the opportunity had originally been presented to me as something that would be centered around security. Maybe someday I would even run the security side of things.

None of that happened.

It turned out to be a pipe dream viewed through some very rose-colored glasses.

When I asked why I was being terminated, the answer was basically, “You’re at will.”

That was it.

I wasn’t particularly impressed with the way it was handled, and I’ll leave it at that.

Five Days Later

About five days after losing the job, I was fishing with my friend Daley when my stomach started bothering me.

I told him I needed to head home. I figured maybe I had a stomach bug or had eaten something bad.

Instead of getting better, the pain became worse.

And worse.

For roughly three days I tried everything. I tried throwing up. I tried lying down. I tried waiting for it to pass.

Eventually I was on the floor in some of the worst pain I have ever experienced and told my son to call an ambulance.

After somewhere around 72 hours of that, I had reached my limit. If childbirth feels anything like that, ladies, I’m sorry. It’s probably ten times worse than what I went through, but this was bad enough for me.

At the hospital I finally asked for pain medication.

Because of my history with opioids, asking for pain medication isn’t something I do casually. They gave me intravenous Tylenol.

I remember thinking, Yeah, okay. I’ve taken opioids before. What’s IV Tylenol going to do?

About five minutes later, the pain disappeared.

I couldn’t believe it.

Surgery, COVID, and the PICC Line

The diagnosis was a ruptured appendix.

I believe I went into surgery the following day and spent the next couple of days beginning what turned into a much longer recovery than I expected.

My wife couldn’t be there with me because she had COVID and wasn’t allowed into the hospital. She was home worrying while I was dealing with everything at the hospital alone.

Even now she’ll occasionally remind me, “You could have died, Brody.”

God, I love her.

Then another reality hit me.

I had just lost my job.

Which meant I had also lost my health insurance.

Not long after surgery, three male nurses came into the room and told me they were taking me downstairs to have a PICC line inserted. I didn’t really know what a PICC line was. I just knew I had recently been fired, my insurance was ending, and suddenly people were talking about putting a line into my body and sending me somewhere else.

In my head, the calculation was simple: they’re putting this thing in me and sending me home because my insurance is about to disappear.

So I refused.

I told them I needed to call my wife first.

Within about an hour, she had me added to her insurance policy.

Then I agreed to the PICC line.

The line allowed antibiotics or other medication to be delivered directly into my bloodstream once I was home. Every several hours my wife or son would deal with the IV medication. I stayed downstairs in my game room, nurses came by periodically, blood was drawn, medications were changed, and I went back to bed.

How long that lasted is blurry now. I think it was several weeks.

Back to the Hospital

Eventually I remember sitting on the couch and realizing I had a fever.

My wife didn’t hesitate. She drove me straight back to the emergency room.

I was admitted again with an infection and eventually had another procedure to drain fluid from my abdomen. A needle and catheter were used to remove the fluid, and afterward I ended up with a drainage bag.

That procedure was also the one time during the entire ordeal that I was given an opioid: fentanyl.

And no, hospital fentanyl isn’t the same thing as whatever somebody buys on the street.

I was awake for the procedure, and the strange part was that I didn’t really think I felt high afterward. Opioids had always felt very specific to me—a warm sensation that could wash through your body unexpectedly.

I didn’t really feel that.

Then I nodded off.

Apparently, in my head, I was back fishing with Daley.

My wife was sitting beside me when I suddenly raised my arm and made a casting motion.

I snapped awake.

She looked at me.

“I was just fishing with Daley,” I told her.

So, yeah.

I was high.

Job Interviews With a Drainage Bag

Eventually I came home again, but this recovery was different. I could move around the house more normally, although I had a drainage bag hanging off my back that I had to empty.

Nasty business.

As the weeks passed, less and less fluid collected until eventually there wasn’t much going into the bag at all.

There was another problem, though.

I still didn’t have a job.

So while recovering from a ruptured appendix, surgery, infection, a PICC line, another hospitalization, and a drainage bag, I started interviewing.

One opportunity began getting serious. The company was CexEX, a contractor supporting the William J. Hughes Technical Center near Atlantic City.

The job was for a security engineer supporting FAA air-to-ground systems.

Now that sounded like me.

I went through three rounds of interviews, with the final one involving a senior engineer at the FAA, with questions on how linux works, what is nmap and a few other questions. I thought I did well, but the entire time I kept expecting something to go wrong. A background check, paperwork, something from my past—anything that would somehow kill the opportunity.

Instead, they hired me.

I couldn’t believe it.

At the same time, somewhere in the back of my mind I had this feeling that it wasn’t going to last. Il be back to starting over after losing my job, again.

Unfortunately, that feeling turned out to be right.

Starting Over Again

After the change in presidential administrations and the federal cuts that followed, my position disappeared.

I was out of work agai back to starting over after losing my job

That was difficult for me to process because losing jobs wasn’t normal for me. Even before I worked in computers, I generally stayed employed. I kept jobs.

Now, in a relatively short stretch of my life, I had lost two jobs and survived a ruptured appendix.

So I called my old mentor.

For years he had told me that when I was ready, I could take over his clients and he could retire. Initially it sounded promising. He began talking to clients about transitioning them over to me.

Then reality showed up.

One company hired someone internally. Others simply disappeared. I did a little work for a lawn-care company, but the grand transition of clients never materialized.

Then another opportunity appeared.

A small RV dealership in Dennis Township, New Jersey, was preparing to terminate the person who had been handling its technology, and my mentor recommended me as the replacement.

He introduced me to the company’s leadership over the phone and asked whether I was interested in contract work or a full-time position.

“Full time, if you’re interested in that,” I told them.

That led to a meeting with the general manager and CFO.

The CFO was understandably nervous. The person they were about to let go had been trusted for years, and changing the person who controls a company’s technology isn’t a small thing. I’ve been involved in enough IT transitions to understand exactly why he was concerned.

I assured him I could handle the transition and protect the company from retaliation or loss of access.

They hired me.

And here I am now, writing this.

Looking back, the sequence still feels bizarre: Resorts, GigaOm, unemployment, a ruptured appendix, surgery, infection, job interviews while recovering, the FAA, another lost job, an attempt to inherit somebody else’s client base, and finally a little RV dealership in South Jersey.

There is one strange part of the timing that I still think about.

When GigaOm let me go, it felt like terrible timing.

A few days later my appendix ruptured.

Had it happened while I was still working there, I have no idea how the situation would have played out.

Actually, I probably do.

This story picks up after my seven years working in cybersecurity at Resorts Casino.