So, in the vein of the thread.......
2007/2008 was a bad time for tech people. I had been working for a consulting firm out of their NYC office, doing DB work for a client down in Charlottesville, VA. A week before my gig ended in the middle of December, the consulting firm decided to fire the whole NYC office. I came back to just a couple people there with no one to place me in a new gig.
So I took a full time position with the client in VA, and we rented a place and moved down there in the summer of 2008.
Fast forward to the summer of 2012 where a few bad things happened to us in Aug/Sept, with the worse being that our 9 year old boy Tyler, after being misdiagnosed for a month, was finally found to have come down with a bad case of cancer. At that point we had no faith in them being able to treat him (and this was at the hospital attached to the University of Virginia medical school!), so we came back up to NJ and had him admitted to Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) in NYC.
I'm a Rutgers graduate and have helped moderate the 2 main sports message boards since the mid 2000's, so I let the admins of both boards know that I'd be offline for a while as we were coming back to our home in NJ which was basically empty. When I finally got back online, I found out that they had put the word out to the Rutgers community and we were inundated with offers to help. I had people offer their homes to us close to MSK, people help me find short term work up here, someone loaned me furniture until we could get everything back up from VA, had the AD on the phone offering help (and this was right in the middle of our Big 10 negotiations), had multiple people help us contingency plan as Superstorm Sandy hit right in the middle of Tyler's 2nd chemo cycle, etc.
The results were that Tyler had 13 weeks of chemo and has been clean ever since. I share the last day of his last chemo cycle (Dec. 20th) every year with members of both boards. I was going to stop at a certain point, but was directly told by several people that they look forward to those updates.
Tyler graduated this past spring with a degree in Aerospace Engineering.
