What’s a place you visited that felt like home?

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When I first worked in the USA, I was just outside Washington, DC. This was 1996, and it was in Virginia, not far from Dulles airfield.

The reason it was there? Was simply because the main backer of the company was from that area, and had some office space we could use.

I wasn’t impressed. Sorry if you happen to live around there, but I didn’t like what I saw.

We were supposedly in the town of Chantilly, but it was like no town I had ever visited. It was a highway, small shopping malls alternating with small clutches of houses. I stayed in a motel, only about 5 minutes from one of those malls by foot, but there were no sidewalks, walking there was walking across roadside grassland, and people were clearly meant to drive everywhere.

I was vegetarian at the time, and someone once suggested a burger restaurant. This was pre-internet, so I called ahead to ask if there was anything suitable on the menu. “The green salad”, was the curt response. Needless to say, I gave them a miss. I couldn’t believe that so close to the capital, in what was billed as the greatest country on earth, the attitude could be so poor.

I finished my work there, and left, deeply unimpressed by the location and quite happy that I would not come to America again.

But the company I worked for was trying to gain a foothold in the USA. It was building a financial application (ironically for this new-fangled internet). It was just closing a deal with Barclaycard in the UK.

The reason I had been sent out to the US in the first place was to work on one of the last parts, encryption work that could only be done in the US. The toolkit we used could not be exported, so we couldn’t just bring it to the UK, we had to go over to the US, incorporate it into our product, and only then could we obtain an export license. In practise, it’s nonsense and it shows how far the law lags behind technology. But rules were rules.

Anyway, at the same time as talking to Barclaycard, they were also talking to Chase, in the US. With hindsight, god knows how, but they did.

Chase had a big campus down in Tampa, Florida, and in order to seal the deal, they wanted to understand some of the technical details. As a senior tekkie, I was asked to fly out to the US again for a series of meetings, this time in Tampa. I reluctantly agreed.

I found Tampa very different to Washington. The place just seemed more relaxed. In addition, parts of the city had some history, going back to Spanish colonial times. I gradually warmed to the environment. So much so, that when the company mentioned a permanent job, in Tampa, I said I’d consider it.

But Tampa wasn’t to be. Due to internal politics at Chase, our product was bumped up the “important” list, and all of a sudden people began talking about New York City. I was lucky – they asked me to go there and help to set up the technical side of the US operation, and I ended up being in New York for several months. Chase even put us up in some decent apartments right on the southern tip of Manhattan island, meaning I could walk to work in the morning. If you know the area, we were in Battery Park City and Chase had just bought Chemical. We worked from one of their old buildings on Water Street.

I fell in love with New York. With the tiny streets of southern Manhattan, dating from the first settlers, it was about as close to a European city as I’d found. But bigger. It appealed perfectly to a twenty-something. I ate out every meal and the fridge contained nothing but beer. I could do anything, buy anything, any time. Living on expenses, remember, we went out in Greenwich Village most nights.

Over the months I was there, though, a few things started to happen. I suppose the most important thing was that the job turned sour. For the first time it felt like I was doing a hard day’s work every day. I’d sit in more and more meetings, hear our company CEO, a man with zero technical knowledge, spout some rubbish or other, and think, “what planet is this guy on?” Plus. I did a lot of interviewing, which is extremely draining. I was still offered a formal job, working for the American company I’d helped set up. Standard US benefits, being paid in US dollars, no more accommodation or expenses etc., essentially the same terms that were mooted in Tampa.

I suppose with hindsight they thought I would do anything to work in the USA. Not so. I digested various cost of living studies and worked out that a beachfront apartment in Tampa would have equated to a shared house in one of the outer boroughs of New York. In the UK, I had even been looking to buy before the move was on the table. So no thanks, I’d had enough of that style of living when I’d been a student.

To finally mull over my options, I took a break and flew back to Europe. I met friends in Paris, and a visit to the Louvre was enough to convince me. Beside a thousand years of history and culture, the USA simply couldn’t compete.