The 2012 Volkswagen Tiguan

Fear grips you being a new parent with a newborn. That fear subsides over time, but so much of business is getting a customer to act using emotional connection as the catalyst of that purchase. We had it with baby bottles--glass or plastic. Much of it we didn't pay attention to, but after the crash in the Kia, I was consumed with making sure that I was in a safe vehicle. Marco's wellbeing, the wreck, and the business interactions gave me a feeling of neurosis in that it was too much to process in too short a time. We were not ready to buy another car, but didn't feel we had much of a choice.

We opted to buy a used Volkswagen Tiguan. It was by far the most beautiful car I have ever owned, with imitation leather seats and a sleek panorama sunroof, but it was the anti-lock brakes, the height of the vehicle, and the safety I desired after the accident that convinced us to buy it. The car was $430 a month on payments plus the $250 per month with the insurance policy. It is worth noting that it required premium gas.

This was shortly after Marco went into childcare because maternity leave was over and my wife had to go back to work--which, by the way, cost us $1500 a month. Our first thought was, "how the hell does anyone have more than one child?" I knew I had to save up for the privilege of parenthood, but getting sold by my dad, an ill-conceived outcome evaporated everything. This money had to be generated with fresh clients and sales; they hadn't been around since 2007. The second stupidest thing I had done in my life looking back was getting myself on the hook for car payments. All of the sudden we were spending $2,300 between the car and childcare alone. We had zero clue of what to do. I am still floored by that number.

Do you know why it costs so much to watch a child? Because nobody has the money to stay home and everybody "works", if you call it that. New parents are genetically disposed to be afraid from the moment they wake up in the morning until the time they go to sleep at night, shit, most of their dreams are fear. Fear of what? Of not making a mistake, because blame, shame, and guilt travel with you now. That didn't happen for me before we had Marco and nor when the business collapsed, but it's everywhere now. It's a feeling that I am much better at managing today. That fear is a potent sales tool. I should have got a cheap, reliable car, but I didn't. I felt a twinge of fear that I am supposed to be in this car, to ensure the safety of my son. Where will that end? I quickly learned that financial truth will promptly bring you back to reality.

I drove the car for an hour into work to watch the business die on the vine--followed by the hour return trip home. A slew of terrible contracts, all not generating enough cash-flow to manage the working capital. I got really good at reassuring people, even the childcare. We eventually got kicked out of it. That was a lovely day. I should note that the shame that I quietly lived with up to this point had evolved into dark humor. Perhaps the next iteration of this publication would be a comedy script that I could pitch to Judd Apatow... Nevermind.

I was in severe pain at the time. After the accident, I was going through daily traction treatments for my severely compressed spine. I would go first thing every morning to the treatment facility and lay down in a machine, with a halo wrapped around my head, attached to a rope and a motor. The machine would pull my head away from my neck and attempt to pull apart my disks like an accordion. I left my phone in the car and didn't bother with work or phone calls.

The business collapsed at the end of 2015. At the beginning of that year I had no idea that was going to happen. The client who fired us came back. We were too desperate to say no thanks. Ultimately that was the company's downfall. He felt remorse for what he did and offered us a loan that we could pay back. Dad accepted it without my brother or myself knowing. He just showed up one afternoon with a check for $60,000. I felt some relief for a weekend over the dread of having him back in our life.

I took dad to lunch one afternoon. We sat down outside and talked about the countless problems at hand. I asked why we had taken this loan.

We had no choice son.

Well, its nearly all gone. We need more, I said.

He then erupted into tears. I had never seen my dad cry before that. All I ever wanted to do was give you boys this business.

I had been floating the business financially for months. I had used my credit card to pay essential bills that came due. I was paid last so that our employees could get paid and continue to show up to work. I was not in a position to make a sound investment decision. In all of the confusion and change, I made the decision to bet on my family, investing all our savings into the company.

Dad ended up managing the client while my brother and I tried to move the business into automation, by getting a cnc router online. Dad and the client had a fight one day, which ended in a suit against us to reclaim the money he had loaned us.

Good business relationships are based purely on the ease of making a payment on time without the check bouncing. Now I had to manage that. Relations soured overnight. It started with our take-home salary, moved to vendors, then to employees. Business credit evaporated, bank allowances evaporated. It slowly ground down to a halt, with stays of execution granted by credit infusions that alleviated short-term pressures, allowing the company to go on for a few more months.

Debt is not cash flow, it is merely a temporary stay of execution. People used each other as a credit card overnight, and there wasn't a B2B memo outlining any of these terms. No plans. Just reaction to the days of the week that strung along in front of your face. I thought some nights, leaving the dark and remote office out in the exurbs somewhere, that that would be the night I was going to get shot by somebody who percieved me to be the scumbag that made his life difficult. Somebody was making my life difficult, and I was doing all that I could.

Life lessons I learned: You should know your walking-away point, especially from a family business. They aren't family, but disguised as your family, and they have their best interests first. Regular business is easy to walk away from, using the following checklist:

1. Does your Boss seem affable, do they say hi in the morning?

2. Is the mission of your company being enacted?

3. Are they paying you late?

4. Do you feel like returning the next day?

5. Do you like what you see in the mirror?

6. Do you know yourself?

Answer no to any of these, start looking for something new. Many of our staff at that time were doing the same.

If you work with your family, the simple act of not being treated with a distant arm's length congeniality is not going to happen. Bad managers like evil patriarchs and matriarchs gaslight to graft their family and staff alike. They play coworkers off one another to instill fear, resentment, and guilt, while all the while those at the top are the architects of those feelings. The difference between a family business and a regular job is that if you are in the middle of a psychologically lousy experience, you can go home, you can visit your folks, your spouse or kids. Have a party with some good friends. A horrible family business takes away everything. Leaving takes strength. Knowing the precise moment you walk away from an entrepreneurial endeavor isn't a weakness. It's a mental skill that uses your sixth sense to define the exact moment that something goes from difficult to imminent.

Managers play this game, of providing only a level of comfort to keep you coming in if they can't ensure that their company misfortune will bleed over to your own disaster. If the worst scumbag manager was the person who developed your mental outlook, say your parent, then you keep coming back asking for more abuse, because you want to achieve for them. That is why the family business is the most difficult to gauge. It is domestic abuse for a paycheck. I learned by failing what the walking away point was.

I now have a sub-500 credit score. I have three defaulted credit cards, which I had used to purchase parts of weeks to keep my dad's company afloat, totaling $9,500. I have $12,000 of working capital that I took out, that I couldn't pay back, that I was personally accountable for. My wife had to default on her own credit card, plus we lost $25,000 in savings, all because I couldn't walk away. I know how to walk away now. I learned that one skill, and that alone is invaluable for the future. We have a plan moving forward and are in the process of recovering. We are becoming stronger by the day.

You aren't supposed to walk away from your parents in old age.

But I am going to.

You don't leave them to struggle with social security and finances.

I am going to.

You don't leave them to battle cancer and heart ailments alone.

I am.

One breaks their multigenerational programming by learning how to walk away.

I now have that ability.

Everything is conditional --- love, devotion, sympathy, family.

It's all conditional.

As a manager, imagine the day that you forgot to say good morning to your best staff member after a hard morning meeting. I've made that mistake just the same as my parents. I've made that mistake to my son and my wife. They are entitled to their walking away points. Just the same as you. My walk won't feel bad, and that's what frightens me. I know how to walk away now. What power does that give me, and what mistakes will I make with this new skill? I just talked to my mom after a few months, and she said she worries about me. I asked why? You get depressed, she said. I said, "No I don't, you just played me when I was young and I didn't know how to process it. I can do that now. I worry about you because you haven't worked in 15 years and one day nobody will be there to do it. I can't do this anymore." I don't feel remorse, about what I said, and the fact that I can say that to my mother and not feel anything makes me sad, and very fearful for what I am capable of.

In my weakness of not being able to temporarily alleviate death, I now have the power to define the life of my family, a new strength found in my frailty of not being able to keep going as I was. Walking away is a strength. This ability to walk away took $90,000 of student loan debt on top of another $20,000 in company debt on top of lost wages for three years of not getting paid. It was a bargain. I was out.

I had my opportunity of spiritual transformation. It was in the chaos of the aftermath of a series of terrible decisions. We were left with decisions that had us choose between what we could keep. Sometimes the car could be paid on time, other times it couldn't. A realization I had in this experience is that the desperation is an American experience. You can decide to let it overtake and run you. You can also understand it is a construct. All of it. You can decide what you want to do and make a plan to get yourself away from the chaos. Marco allowed me to see myself from another vantage point. I saw all of the missed opportunities and wanted to invest in having my son see and experience some of the things I couldn't. Marco allowed me to see a way forward in my life with the Tempor project. My path forward lay in the aftermath of a horrible purchase, a 2012 VW Tiguan.

It seems that every car with less than one hundred thousand miles costs $20,000 minimum. The Tiguan is essentially a jacked up VW Golf. It would be more fun to own the golf, but it has the same engine, it is heavier, and it rides higher. Its high center of gravity and short wheelbase makes it twitchy on the highway. The heavy weight creates more wear and tear on the vehicle. It is a 2.0 TSI 4 cylinder motor. Newer cars of the era solve the problem of having a small motor power a heavy car by using a turbocharger to boost the horsepower. However, the Tiguan's turbo is underpowered and so heats up the car considerably in the summertime and in stop-and-go traffic.

In Houston, the only driving condition you seem to be in most of the time is stop-and go-traffic. It heats up the oil, the oil burns off, and the car is liable to overheat a lot. Not in-the-red overheating, it just ticks above the average operating temperature. When this happens, I shut off the A/C, then it ticks down to normal. Then I turn on the A/C and it ticks back up. I regularly check the engine oil--it requires a full synthetic, which more pricey. It needs a thin viscosity 5w30, a full synthetic which burns off quicker than thicker oil in order to maintain higher fuel efficiency. These cars claim mythological service intervals: lifetime transmissions where you never have to change transmission fluid; oil service computers that tell you to change the oil every 10,000 miles. In reality, you are putting a quart and a half of new engine oil, costing about $20, in every 1,000 miles. A car that necessitates this degree of babying is not fun to drive.

To make matters worse, when you are broke with a car on payments, and you can't afford to have somebody who can look at it, you take matters into your own hands. For those reasons, this car was the most excellent teacher to me of any car I owned, because it owned me. The vehicle has a direct injection engine, where the fuel is injected directly into the combustion chamber, as opposed to a more common method of injection through the intake valve. This allows for an ultra lean mixture to be fired in the combustion chamber, increasing fuel efficiency. The downside to this new generation of engine is that the fuel traditionally cleaned carbon buildup on the intake valve. Direct injection cars have no way to clean carbon buildup, which requires these cars to run premium gas, and run thin, expensive synthetic oil, utilizing a turbocharger and complex vacuum systems to force air to maximize combustion, heating up the car considerably. The car is costly and nerve-wracking to drive. It requires me to use a computer to pinpoint problems. The biggest problem I have encountered is cylinder coil failure, which is familiar with TSI's causing a flash check engine. This usually happens when I am happy, having forgotten about the car for a moment, and am driving with the panoramic sunroof open, blasting music with the wind in my hair. It is then that the car misfires dramatically. It's just temperamental enough to make me worry. And this is the car we drove during this trip.