Coincidence

Written in August 2008
Coincidence
Back in 1966, after spending two years in the kibbutz, I decided that I was, after all, a city boy…
I was missing life in Milano, even though it was easier to find a girl in the kibbutz…
girls coming from Scandinavia looking for fun and sunshine…

So I left this communal farm and moved to Haifa where my mother had moved from Athens because Guido, her husband, had been transferred. Finding a job was harder than I thought… then I saw an ad in the Jerusalem Post for a technician to work on board a liner, responsible for the network of TV sets throughout the ship.
It sounded exciting, my language knowledge was a real advantage. But I had to pass a test… so I went to the Technion (technical university) library and studied the English terminology, since I had learned electronics and TV in Italian…
Having passed the test, I was told that I would get an answer within three weeks, and start working a month later, you can imagine how happy I was…
A couple of nights later I was in a disco, the “Club 120” and I was talking to an American at the bar, when he asked me what was I doing I told him about my future job on the liner called Shalom.
His expression changed, and he said… “Don’t take it, because I am here negotiating the sale of the Shalom to a Norwegian company, and the crew is not part of the deal”.
I got home pretty depressed, and to check this guy out, I asked Guido, my stepfather, who was in the shipping business on the veracity of this story. After checking the next day, he confidentially got confirmation.
Now that my dream job fell through I luckily found a tech job in a start-up designing a mini-computer…
thus launching a career that spread over three continents, during three decades.