When did I find Lotus nirvana?

Actually it wasn't until many years later when I met Ed Brill and was about to present on R5 Messaging, with him and Mike Harer in Berlin for Lotusphere Europe in one of the main rooms.
That was the best and I knew it was what I wanted to do. Still is.

So back in 1992 or so I was working at Bankers Trust, now part of Deutsche Bank, on their PC Support side when they brought in 2.x of Notes for us to look at. I thought it was great, a non textual UI for email and connecting with people(always hated VM and WYSE terminals, and if you remember those and more.. never mind). Was part of the support side of it, from day 1(not much has changed) and it was soon after Lotus came and said wait for R3. So the bank did, I didn't.
In the mean time I left the bank for another bank for double the money(loved the early 90's), to get called back a few months later when BT was ready to roll out R3, but this time the network guys wanted me as they knew I liked the product and idea.
So off I went back, at more money again, and built 100's of OS/2 servers for Domino, then a few Novell ones, then Windows et al. I think that was also the first and only time I took a class on Notes, client or server.

In cleaning my files out recently I came across an ad from the NY Times circa 1994 from Lotus looking for people(note to self, scan it in and post). Needless to say the individual at the time never returned my interest and it took 4 more years for me to get inside.
I met the person while working for Lotus and told her the story, she probably still thinks they never should have hired me :-)

It's a funny thing, 15 years later to still be involved, and see so many others from the early days, even if it took 10 years to meet some of them.