At liberty: Writer, editor, manager, geek, chef de cuisine, raconteur

Hi. I’m Barry Campbell, and this is an application for a job.

I’m an experienced writer, editor and manager based in Chapel Hill, NC, although I also have many clients and friends in New York City, where I lived for the last 14 years.

I can do at least a couple of things that are worth paying me for:

• As a manager, I lead highly skilled, cross-functional teams to produce complex and demanding deliverables on tight deadlines and budgets. (Often, these deliverables are documents with significant business and legal importance, such as proposals and statements of work.)
• As an individual contributor, I explain complex technical concepts to nontechnical audiences, and craft compelling, persuasive business cases and presentations for proposals and grant applications.

Whether you need to hire a player or a coach – I happily do both jobs, by the way, and as a manager I strongly prefer a role as a “player-coach” – I have a long track record achieving excellent results despite limited resources and demanding schedules. Besides “player-coach,” other (printable) words colleagues have used to describe me include trainer, facilitator, mentor, problem-solver and creative thinker.

I relocated to North Carolina for family reasons. My wife is going back to grad school at Carolina, and my mother, who lives in Raleigh, is in poor health; we needed to be closer. Besides, I grew up here, and attended UNC myself; who wouldn’t want a chance to return to Chapel Hill to live? I love New York City and will happily travel there as required for business, but the Triangle is now my home.

I’ve spent the last four years working with a very dynamic company in hyper-growth mode (see: “Inside the Tornado,” by technology guru/visionary Geoffrey Moore, if you’re curious about what that was like), and I helped the company grow its proposal-based business eightfold (an 808% increase, to be precise) in the first year, once they decided to let me meddle with the processes a little. (OK, I'll cop to it: I built their processes from the ground up and eliminated a lot of churn.)

Root-cause analysis of the company’s rapid growth in the last several years would lead you, at least in some small part, to a snapshot of me and my team huddled over our keyboards, knocking out a volume of precisely targeted proposals and RFP responses that would likely surprise you. (It surprised us!)

I was also responsible for more conventional technical documentation and training requirements, analyst relations, and some other fairly important things, too.

If certifications impress you, I have some. I’m ITIL v3 Foundation certified (and was v2 certified before that), and a PRINCE2 certified project manager, and a bunch of other things actually; ask to see my resume if you care. (If you’ve been in this business a while and certifications don’t impress you all that much, I like you already. Even if you don’t hire me, we should have lunch.)

I’m at liberty, available May 1, and I’m taking a lot of lunches. ;-) You know how to get in touch.

Two views

View out office window, New York City:



View out office window, Chapel Hill:

Hunting and gathering: check

A month into The Move, today was a fun-filled day of previously-deferred nesting activity.

After a hearty breakfast at Elmo's and a trip to the Farmer's Market (de rigueur on Saturday mornings), we drove over to Raleigh to check out Hipsteria, a furniture store downtown that specializes in used mid-century modern furniture.

We, uh, bought a few things.



A kitchen table.



A couch and coffee table.



An armchair.

And so on.

Their buyer has a great eye - and I'm looking forward to meeting him tomorrow, when he delivers the furniture. :-)

What a nice surprise to find this thirty minutes away.

Related: Hipsteria in Raleigh (The Estate of Things)

Bella and the deer

There's a trio of female deer who pass through our back yard on a pretty regular basis (I only caught two of them in this picture). My home office has a nice view of the yard, but even if I'm not gazing out the window when they arrive, Chow Bella always lets us know when the deer are visiting. (Lots of barking.)

I knew it would happen sooner or later, and as it turns out, it was sooner: I was out in the yard with Bella this afternoon when one of the hooved ruminant trio poked her head into the yard, followed closely by her traveling companions. (They really seem to enjoy eating the clover that grows in abundance where the yard verges on woods - a better setup, if you're a deer in the 'burbs, can scarcely be imagined.)

Oh boy, I thought - here we go. Bella was off the leash (one of the little luxuries rarely afforded her outside a dog park, while she lived in NYC) and I wasn't sure "voice control" was gonna work all that well up against some actual Wildlife On The Hoof.

But Bella surprised me. She trotted maybe a dozen feet closer to the deer and then stopped in her tracks and barked.

Yeah, she barked - but from a posture that every dog owner, and any other student of canine psychology, professional or amateur, would instantly recognize: head down, ass up and wagging her tail furiously as she vocalized.

My newly suburban dog, having spotted three deer in her yard, wanted to play with them.

Happily (I think) deer don't "speak" dog, and they certainly don't grok dog body language. We saw some nice flashes of white deer-tail as the whitetail deer fled. And I cursed myself for leaving the house without my cell phone, or any other camera-bearing instrument, such as a camera.

P.S. I have decided to name the deer after the Andrews Sisters. Henceforth they shall be known on this blog as as LaVerne, Maxene and Patty.

Meet the new neighbors

"Oh, hi... you got cable?"

(These two visitors are at the perimeter of the back yard, where the woods begin.)

Happy realization about the new place

"We're basically across the street from a 20,000 square foot dog park!"


About to become a very happy camper.

We honestly had no idea.

Chapel Hill notes

First weekend in the new place. And this has been one hell of a long week.

The packing/loading/driving/unloading process - all of which was compressed into a roughly 36-hour timeframe from 8:30 AM Monday morning (movers arrive at old place and start packing) to 4:30 PM Tuesday afternoon (movers depart new place having offloaded all packed boxes) kicked my ass worse than anything in recent memory, and was similar for Carrie, I think.


Side yard view

But: We have the kitchen, bedroom, and office set up. We've turned the second bedroom (which will eventually be the guest room) into a Den of Sin where we retreat in the evenings to listen to the radio, surf the Net on our laptops and drink beer (there's only so much unpacking you can cope with in a day.)

The great room is still neck deep in boxes and will be for a while until we figure out our bookshelf situation, and our "kitchen table" is a card table and folding chairs yanked from Mom's house, but yeah, this already feels like home.

Gato was pretty freaked on Day 2 of the process but by Day 3 (Wednesday) was strutting around like he owned the place. Chow Bella, sweet as ever, just follows us from room to room and plops down in the doorway to guard... she wore herself out protecting us from the Weird Men Who Had All Our Furniture And Stuff on Tuesday, but still takes guard duty seriously.

The house is situated on five acres on what used to be the outskirts of town, in a region that features McMansions, middle class homes (the nabe right behind us) and trailer parks all cheek-by-jowl, in the way that only a Southern town of about 40,000 people could pull off. The local supermarket boasts two aisles of food designed to appeal to homesick Mexican folks and two aisles of yuppie/organic (organic dark chocolate, etc.) in addition to all the regular grocery-type stuff you'd look for.... it's like that. I shop in all the aisles happily. The noodle soups designed to appeal to the Mexican market, for instance, are pretty awesome (beef ginger pot noodles = massive win).

The Carrboro Farmer's Market is the bee's knees. After breakfast at Elmo's Diner (perfectly nice, inexpensive) we headed to the town square, and bought local hothouse tomatoes, half a lemon poundcake, goat cheese, homemade relish...

Carrie bought locally produced and spun yarn. I predict Farmer's Market blogging from her soonest.

There's more unpacking to cope with, but we've prioritized well.

The new crock pot is slowly simmering a cut-up chicken and veggies, and we'll be eating that in six hours or so with warm flour tortillas.

Life is good, full stop.

Scenes from a move

The movers having brought his couch back, Mister Gato is feeling more like himself.

And this was *after* giving a bunch of books away

when english majors marry
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

When English majors marry: a cautionary tale.

Foreground: Some (but by no means all) of the books from our NYC apartment, stacked up by the front door of our new home in North Carolina.

Relocation trip report

The team of movers packed up fifteen years of our lives and loaded everything onto a truck in about six hours, starting at 8:30 Monday morning.

Carrie, Mister Gato, Chow Bella and I were on the road to North Carolina around 3PM, pulling into the driveway at the new place around 12:30 this morning. We drove through a torrential rainstorm for over half the trip, making I-95 even more disagreeable than it usually is, but we all made it in one piece. :-)

Gato, who was not as wigged out by the road trip as we feared, has in fact been pretty comprehensively discombooberated by the actual move. He is currently hiding out in the laundry room, which must feel like a safe place to him (cats hate change, and moving a cat to a new place, if memory serves, usually involves a lengthy adjustment period.)

He is coming out periodically to love on us and munch a little cat food; he'll figure out that this is his new place soon enough.

Meanwhile, the Chow seems to have figured out that she owns a yard now. :-) Lots and lots of grinning and wagging.

We're drinking coffee and shaking off the stiffness of the road. Slept on air mattresses and sleeping bags last night (and slept *well*, once I got to sleep... Carrie can sleep under any circumstances, bless her heart; I am almost sick with envy in situations like this.)

In another three hours or so, the guys will be pulling up with the entire contents of our one-bedroom Manhattan apartment, which we'll be distributing across roughly three times the square footage we used to have.

Life is (provisionally) good.