Leaving Vermont

    The other day, I said goodbye to a man I describe to people as my “tech guy.”  That is shorthand for, “the person who helps me navigate -- if not understand -- the information highway.”  I’ll miss him, not merely for his expertise but also because he has become a friend.  He is a private person and asked that I not use his name in anything I might write about him and his reasons for leaving.  So I’ll call him Dave.   

    When we first met, Dave was okay with helping me on the tech stuff – he could do that with two fingers on his left hand while writing code with his right. He’d moved here from Boston where he’d handled the IT side of things for some large corporations, so a little backwoods blog was as easy to him as breathing.  He was a little skeptical, though, about the content side of things; wasn’t, he said, very political.  “I guess you’d call me sort of a libertarian,” he said.  He just wanted to live quietly in Vermont and handle business for his clients – most of whom were from out of state.  “I can live anywhere,” he said.  “And this is a good place to live.  There is even some work here, in-state.  It doesn’t pay as well as my other clients do but I get some face-to-face meetings and that’s nice.”
    As we worked together – often on a crash/crisis basis – Dave and I talked more and more about the content of this site.  I won’t say he “came around” because, in fact, he was already there.  He had the normal aspirations.
    “I’d like to buy a house,” he said, “and start thinking about kids and saving for their education but … jeez.”  And he spread his hands in the old “what are you going to do” gesture.
    And, then, there were the requirements of his kind of work.  Things like cell service and broadband.
    “Comcast won’t run the cable up the road as far as where we live,” he told me one day. “So I get DSL from VermontTel because it is the only game in town.  Sixty bucks a month.  Anywhere else, I could get more than twice the speed for half the money.”
    The cell phone situation was even more frustrating.  Without it, he was at a distinct competitive disadvantage.  “When clients need you, they need you right now.  An hour is a long time.  If I’m out running errands, and they can’t get me … well, that’s a problem.  There are people in India they can talk to just by picking up the phone.  I look like a local yokel in comparison.”
    And, finally, there was the cost of health insurance.  “I get a ‘deal’ by Vermont standards because I joined the local chamber.  But I still pay twice what I would in other places for coverage that isn’t any better and maybe not as good.  Those places, I could get in a plan with some professional association but they aren’t allowed to do business in Vermont.  The Chamber experience has been great, for the networking and all.  The talented people are here and everyone is real open and helpful.  But you keep running into these … walls.”
    There was, he explained, the whole realm of hand-held wi-fi devices.  “That’s the way things are moving in my world.  People are producing content for those devices and I need to be able to run them to do the IT work.  But without the infrastructure …”
    These were the laments we talked about, over coffee, after he’d rescued me from one tech glitch or another.  And I began to see Dave as sort of the model for the kind of small, non-polluting, high earning entrepreneur that Vermont needs not simply more of, but a lot more of. 
    I assumed our gripe sessions would just go on but I hadn’t taken into account that thing called “mobility.”  Just because Vermont needs him, that doesn’t mean he needs Vermont.  I got the inevitable call a week or two ago.
    “Well,” he said, “we’re leaving.”
    Turns out, Dave and his wife had spent a couple of weeks looking at places.  “Down south,” he said.  “Everyone we know is moving south.”
    For all the reasons we had talked about.  He could buy a house, get broadband and cell phone, lower premiums for his health care.  Yadda, yadda.  But there was something else. 
    “Everywhere we went, we found this optimistic attitude.  There is this feeling of ‘let’s do business.’  How can we make it easier.  You just don’t find that in Vermont.”
    But, he reassured me, he’d still be available to bail me out.  Be more accessible, in fact, with reliable cell coverage.  He’d miss the coffee and the gripe sessions but the work part would be fine. However, the checks (admittedly small in this case of this particular client) would now be cashed at an out-of-state bank. 
    I’m going to miss Dave.  But not as much as Vermont (and its economy) will.    

      
   
    

Comments

[R F Randall]

I'm a 4th or 5th generation Vermonter who had the good sense to move out of the state some 50 years ago. One of my great-grandfathers from Vermont fought in the Civil War. I used to be proud of the state, its rock solid commonsense and rugged individualists. My family was Republican going all the way back to my grandfather who voted for Teddy Roosevelt. It's sad that the hippies and environmentalists have taken over this used-to-be great state. Some of us thought they would move away after experiencing a couple of Vt. winters. Now it's a subject of ridicule in many of the VT stories printed in national newspapers. You seem to have a lot of commonsense but that seems a rare commodity in the Green Mountain state today. I wish you well in your efforts to instill a little sanity in the body politic.
P.S. I'm thinking of telling everyone I came from New Hampshire.