Even though I was still not working my wife and I wanted more children. Both of us had come from families that consisted of 3 children and we knew others that had come from families of just one child. We agreed that we did not want our son to be a only child and by February 1995 she was pregnant with my daughter. My daughter was born just about the same time I had finally gotten around to send out my CV to all of 70+ companies.
My wife had had a terrible 48 hours in the delivery room, she did not dilate completely and did not want to do a C section. She did not want to induce labor either. Knowing full well, as a mid wife's helper, that when labor is induced the birth can go very quickly and the pain of birth is sometimes then amplified even more. In the end she was asked to either go home and come back when she was ready to give birth or let them induce labor chemically. There were several problems with going home. She was getting contractions on a regular basis, one of the reasons she had not been able to sleep, and they had been somewhat of an annoyance to her. Not only that but the delivery room at the hospital were she had worked as a mid wife's helper had finally closed and we had had to get a taxi to the nearest hospital. The ride from where we lived had taken over an hour. What if the baby where to suddenly decide to want to come out? She decided to induce labor.
After a lot of pain our daughter was born on October 4th 1995. The two best days of my life and the best things that I have ever been (half) responsible for are my two children. I felt like dancing around the delivery room!
As I had written in the My Trading History Part 5 post I had received a positive reply from LM Ericsson (the mobile telephone company) and so I was hopeful that I would finally be able to start working at a job that actually payed me. The only problem was that the job was located in Stockholm about 2 hours by train from where I lived. I scheduled a time for the interview and after the Christmas holidays I went into Stockholm by train. I spent the morning checking out the city, which is beautiful, and then that afternoon went in for the interview. Two hours later after being shown around the plant I came out with a new job.
It was with mixed emotions that I told my wife about the good news. I knew that I would have to move closer to my new job as I had discussed this earlier with my friend Magnus (the fund manager I wrote about in My Trading History Part 1) Finding an apartment in Stockholm, even then, was not that easy. Now it is close to impossible if you don't have the money to buy one.
Luckily Magnus had started working in Stockholm about three months earlier as an analyst for a company that released a weekly news letter and was able to rent an apartment from a friend that was on assignment over seas for 6 months. I moved in with Magnus and slept on the couch in the living room.
The job at LM Ericsson was shift work in a small assembly plant that built base station equipment. What we basically did was perfect the assembly process and then shipped the assembly line process to other plants around the world. I started working on an assembly line basically screwing equipment that looked to be the size on a banana box or moving box together. Not my dream job by any sense of the word but a job just the same.
On the weeks when I was working days Magnus and I would meet in the center of Stockholm in the evening to drink a couple of beers and talk about the stuff we were working on. Of coarse Magnus work as a analyst was much more interesting to me and we usually just talked about the stock market and the companies he and his company were following.
Then on the week ends I would take the train home to my wife and children.
