I'm Married To A Celebrity

No doubt only a mere Memphis celebrity for a day. Beats not being a celebrity at all I suppose lol.

This morning, on a slow news day (his words, not mine), an article in the local newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, was posted about ROMT. Yup, the husband!!

The article is as follows (in case the link above doesn't work) but let me prep you... there is nothing in it about me even tho' I was bloody interviewed HAHAHAHA! Well at least it mentioned my name lol. I suppose everything I said just all ended up on the editing room floor hahaha. It also did not print our neice's name (the one in Singapore of course!) or my brother would owe Bruce some loot... but in his defense, Emma's name was mentioned. I was there when he said her name :) At least he tried...


MUS alum's talent was Microsoft's loss
Photo Mike Brown
Special to The Commercial Appeal

Bruce Ryan is in his fifth year teaching eighth-grade algebra at Memphis University School, where he graduated in 1980. He left a lucrative position at Microsoft to return to the classroom.

April 17, 2006
The e-mail came from an old mentor at Memphis University School, Bruce Ryan's yearbook adviser to be exact, and it contained a familiar entreaty.

"Bruce, are you still alive?" wrote Ellis Haguewood, now the MUS headmaster.

"If yes, go to question #2. If no, skip down to the end.

"Is there life after Microsoft? If yes, where is it?

"You know that we could use a good-looking guy like you at MUS for a few years or a few months or even a few days."

During his 10 years at Microsoft, Bruce Ryan heard various versions of that pitch from Haguewood, but he was usually too busy working for one of the world's most powerful and important companies to even contemplate moving back to Memphis, much less consider working for his old high school.

He had graduated from MUS in 1980 and gone to Harvard, then to Stanford for business school and law school. He got to Microsoft in 1989, when there were 3,000 employees and six buildings.

When he left Microsoft in 1999, there more than 30,000 employees and more than 100 buildings.

Inside the Microsoft culture, where products are created with an almost evangelical zeal, shaping young minds sounds like a noble enough calling.

But Microsoft was trying to change the world, after all.

Go back to MUS? "That always seemed like a very fantastical thing that would never happen," Ryan remembers.

And yet, not long after getting the e-mail, Ryan found himself sitting in Haguewood's office, talking about a role as the school's chief of technology. Then the phone rang, and it was Major Wright, a math teacher and football assistant, informing Haguewood he was leaving for White Station.

"We'll find another eighth-grade algebra teacher," Ryan heard Haguewood say.

When Haguewood put down the phone, Ryan asked: "Mr. Haguewood, can I teach eighth-grade algebra?"

"He looked at me kind of funny," Ryan remembers, "and I don't know to this day if he was wondering whether I could do it or why on earth would I want to do it."

'Microsoft was a good preparation'

On a recent Monday in Mr. Ryan's classroom at MUS, the topics for the day are scrawled on a giant whiteboard.

Review Irrational Numbers

Introduce Radical Numbers

Standing before a classroom of eighth-graders, Ryan looks so comfortable in his fifth year at MUS that he could have been shipped from central casting.

"Indefatigable" is how Haguewood remembers Ryan as a student, and it isn't far off now as he takes students through the tricky fundamentals of converting fractions to decimals and delving into the complex world of square roots.

"Loving it, loving it, loving it," he cackles when the students find the midpoint between two fractions.

His class is a mix of formal and informal, casual and serious.

Kind of like Microsoft.

"Microsoft was a good preparation for teaching at MUS," Ryan says.

"We had a lot of smart folks at Microsoft, but they were not always the most mature people in the world."

At MUS, among 'boyhood heroes'

When he started teaching, Ryan says, he was nervous, more so because of the company he was keeping than the students he would teach.

Many of the teachers he found at MUS when he moved from Boston as a 15-year-old remain on the faculty.

"To me," he says, "it's like growing up with your boyhood heroes being the New York Yankees and then actually getting to play with them."

This, mind you, from a man who has stood on stage with Bill Gates in New York and given presentations. This from a guy who took one year away from Microsoft to work as a producer on the old show "American Gladiators."

"But that's another story," Ryan will say, and it is true that so many of his tales veer away from the main path.

There's the time he spent moonlighting as part-owner of Schulzy's Sausage in Seattle.

There's the long courtship with his wife, Karen, who is from Singapore and met him when a co-worker suggested she e-mail him for advice on a software glitch. They got engaged two days after 9/11 and married two weeks after that, on the MUS steps.

And there is the story of his good friend John Nielson, who like Ryan had joined Microsoft in the late '80s.

Nielson died shortly before Ryan left Microsoft, and Ryan can still remember his funeral, at Bill Gates' house, and hearing letters Nielson had written to his young children.

"It was," Ryan says, "the first time when I actually sensed that, despite my youth, time was a limited and precious commodity even for the young."

That led to Ryan re-evaluating his life, to thinking more about things like family. His mother, sister and two nieces live here, his father in Hot Springs, Ark.

"I would fly in for 24 hours on a holiday break, say hello, drop off some Christmas gifts and fly off to my next destination, wherever that might be," Ryan says.

With stock options, a nice salary and promotions over the years, he had done well. He is not a "billionaire," though some of his students have told him he must be.

Maybe if he hadn't cashed all those stock options in the early years ...

"I used to know people who sold none of their stock and so now they live in giant mansions and have streets named after them. I was not one of those people. I made enough money so that I can both teach here and make charitable donations to organizations that mean a lot to me."

In that e-mail from six years ago, Haguewood had said, "Actually the pay could be seven figures per year, if two of them follow the decimal point."

Ryan knows his math too well to fall for that one, but he also knows there are different ways to measure value.

"I wasn't sure how long I would do it when I came in. I get so much joy out of coming to work here every day. It is really exciting."

From MUS to Microsoft and back -- it may sound radical and even a little irrational, but Bruce Ryan is loving it.

--Zack McMillin: 529-2564