Candidate for
Board of Supervisors; San Francisco County; District 11

FAMILY RETAIL BUSINESS

I was born and raised in Iowa, one of five children. My parents opened a business in 1950 called The Goodnature Store in a town of 3,000 people. Preparing for a sale was like planning a big party. My brothers and I dropped ads door-to-door, decorated the store, attached sale tags and set up displays. Sometimes we would be photographed for the newspaper. Our George Washington's birthday sale was the best! We gave away Elsie Hrubes' single-serving homemade cherry pies to the first hundred customers. When I turned 13, I became an employee working after school, Saturdays and school breaks. I was paid minimum wage. My dad said, "Save 80%, give 10% to the church and spend 10% on recreation." My dad co-signed the savings account to check compliance. My brothers who worked the same hours and had the same savings instruction had more spending money than I did. Why? They knew my dad never checked our bank accounts. The store grew from a 2,000 square foot double-store front to a 14,000 square foot five-store front retail space with 16 employees and $1.7 million in annual gross revenues. Three generations of my family and four generations of another family have worked there. My sister now runs the store, as my dad is deceased.

EDUCATION

In high school, I was in the Honor Society, played clarinet and tuba in marching and concert band, performed in debates, speech contests, stage plays and was student council president. I graduated from Iowa State University cum laude with a B.S. in Chemistry, Zoology and Psychology. I was inducted to the collegiate honor societies Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi.

HEALTH CARE WORK

After 18 months at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics I joined the Peace Corps in Yemen Arab Republic. I worked for the Expanded Program of Immunization, a global initiative to vaccinate children against tuberculosis, polio, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus and smallpox. We had clinics with refrigeration to keep the vaccines viable spaced throughout the country. To go remote, I drove a 4-wheel drive Land Rover over tire track roads with no road signs, streetlights or road maps with vaccines in coolers of blue ice. Along the way, Bedouins would direct me in Arabic to the next stop. I vaccinated from rustic clinics or the back of the Land Rover. Most villages lacked electricity, as did some of my Tehamah Desert clinics. Those clinics had diesel-burning refrigerators. I re-fueled tanks, trimmed wicks and aligned the flame housing for optimal efficiency. Televisions were rare and usually powered for short spans by a car battery in the sitting room. Others homes had motor generators with noise levels louder than the TV. During my tour of service, smallpox was deemed eradicated from the world.

EDUCATOR

Following Peace Corps, I moved to the Sultanate of Oman to train new Peace Corps volunteers, then taught at the Sultan's School.

PUBLIC BUILDING DEVELOPER

In Oman, I joined the newly formed Sultan Qaboos University Project Office whose charter was to develop a 5-year plan to build the first university in Oman. We did curriculum development for five colleges; namely Medicine, Engineering, Agriculture, Education and Science. During this phase I hosted meetings of professors from all over the world, taping all sessions reel-to-reel for later transcription. We had electric typewriters, no personal computers. In tandem I handled bid applications from the world's largest developers, manually plotting each contender's bid components on a huge comparative matrix. Sultan Qaboos University broke ground in 1982 and opened in 1986.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (IT) PROFESSIONAL

I joined American President Lines (APL) as mainframe computing was burgeoning. I moved to Hong Kong to extend our computer systems throughout our Asian offices. I trained 10 trainers for a "big bang" network-wide rollout of our equipment operating system, then went to Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Kaohsiung had the highest cargo throughput hence was our largest most critical operational facility. I trained staff and ensured implementation success. Later, in West Asia I replaced ditto machines and typewriters with computerization. Not only did the machines become obsolete, so did ditto master correction fluid and multi-ply whiteout. We either replaced our Far East local systems (System 36's) or connected them to our mainframe applications via data transmission.

ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

In APL Hong Kong I developed and implemented a Total Quality Management program throughout Asia. After training upper management in Asia, I hired 9 managers from various countries. We transformed the materials for 8 cultures, ensuring cultural compatibility, and translated to 5 languages.

GLOBAL HELP DESK AND IT PROJECT MANAGER

I returned to APL United States to manage a 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week application and infrastructure Help Desk. We provided technical support to our global population, running 3 weekday shifts and 2 weekend shifts with 15 first-level staff and 7 second-level staff. I replaced a trouble ticket system with another whose functionality was leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessor. One-time implementation costs were recovered within 2 years due to dramatically reduced licensing and support fees. While managing the Help Desk, I worked on various projects: business process and application upgrades to accommodate new business demands and regulatory mandates as well as cost reduction outsourcing and off shoring. Among the biggest recent global efforts was a project to comply with the 2003 U.S. Customs and Border Patrol mandate to electronically transmit container manifests (container contents) at least 24 hours prior to an inbound-to-the-US container loading the last foreign water port. Due to the global scope, complexity and short notice, this was our biggest first-half-of-the-decade business process and application challenge. We succeeded, i.e., we implemented on time, complied with all new regulations and were not fined or penalized. Among my last projects was a move of my team's job function to Malaysia saving 80% in operational overhead.