Houston

Such a shame!

According to some people, it's a lovely city, welcoming and safe and lively. Not my experience

We arrived when Houstoners were expecting a hurricane and all the hotels and motels were full. We finally found a place to stay outside of Houston and waited out the storm. Inside our shelter, it was calm and almost boring. Outside it ripped apart houses, destroyed some, wrecked businesses, and made a mess of public utilities.

We tried to find an aartment. Ha-ha! NASA had hired a whole slew of engineers and scientists for the Apollo Project, and all of us were looking for a place at the same time. Landlords loved it!

Once again we tried to buy and succeeded. Hoo boy! No lovely little house at the end of an easement! An ugly ranch house in La Porte, TX, a "city" that only existed to catch the overflow from NASA and the Port of Houston, and other public works contracts. Some developer saw a way to make a killing and did.

The house was not only ugly but we kept finding flaws; leaking pipes, an air conditioner that didn't but was almost rusted through, a sink that didn't quite seal to its support or its plumbing. It was a crumby house and probably had been built that way.

But that was Houston for me. At an intersection a few miles from where we lived two drivers collided. They jumped out of their pickups and shot each other dead.

At work, we Boeing engineers were pariahs. People were certain we had been brought in to eliminate their jobs. No one in Houston seemed to know what our jobs were. People made work for us, junk work, irrelevant to the mission.

After eleven months, I quit.

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