Twenty five years ago today, I was busy preparing to go on a trip and trying really hard to not think about the purpose for the trip and how I was going to travel. In twenty four hours I would be driving to a small, regional airport to get on an airplane for the first time in my life and travel to Warren, Michigan for a hiring interview with EDS.

I was to fly in a small airplane from Kingsford, Michigan to the world's busiest airport in O'Hare, Illinois, board a large jumble jet to fly to Detroit, Michigan, get a rental car, drive to the GM Tech Center in Warren, Michigan for an interview after which I knew I would either get a job offer or be told thanks for coming.

My first "real" job after graduating college, one that would cause me to move to the "big city." The interview would change my life, and given all that I had to do for the first time in my life, it's a miracle I even made it to the interview on time, let alone get the job.

I don't know why I expected to be able to sleep the night before the trip, but it wasn't going to happen. I had settled in my bedroom that evening to watch the World Series before going to bed when the earth shook in San Francisco and Al Michaels transitioned from baseball play-by-play man to the primary on the scene reporter for a huge natural disaster.

I stayed up all night watching reports about the earthquake, I might have got an hour or two of sleep, but it wasn't much.

Adrenaline carried me through the airports, planes, cars, an interview that lasted hours, a rush to a clinic to pee in a cup for a drug test, check into a hotel, a phone call to my grandma, and a celebratory dinner at Denny's before crashing in my hotel bed.

Too tired to think about where I was, too tired to think about what had just happened, and too tired to remember to turn off the lights to my rental car.