A Brief Introduction

I was born in a suburb of Paducah, Kentucky in 1960, and spent the next ten years in various towns and cities in Kentucky and Illinois, including Harrisburg and Carbondale. While I am amazed that I still remember this, I went to Springmore for kindergarten and elementary, and then transferred to Brush Elementary for 5th grade when bussing began. In 1970 my family moved to Plantation, Florida, where I attended Plantation Park Elementary, Seminole Middle School, and South Plantation High School. I was a part of the stage band, the marching band, the concert band, the choir, and the literary magazine staff. I kept busy, getting grades good enough to cause my guidance counselor considerable chagrin when I told her I was going to major in music with a minor in creative writing. "You are wasting so much potential!" she cried.

That house in Plantation was my home until I left for college back in Kentucky. I spent a year playing trombone in various bands while studying music composition and English at Murray State University (Murray, Kentucky). Again, I got good grades, but it only took me a year to figure out that the classical composer gig was simply not going to happen. Not if I wanted to eat, anyway.

So I returned to Plantation with — shall we say — new ambitions. (Or, to be frank, lack thereof.)

Soon I’d moved to a one-room efficiency by Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport at Dania. I stayed there for several years, then bopped around a series of apartments in Miramar, Hollywood, and Hallandale before settling back down in Plantation. That Plantation apartment was my home through my long-term relationship, engagement, and the first part of my marriage. In 1998 the North Miami/Miami Shores area became my home for the rest of my marriage — including my separation and eventual divorce. (No bitterness; these things happen.)

That’s right, I lived in Miami, cocaine capitol of America. (Thankfully, it held no appeal for me. It was everywhere!)  I never learned fluent Spanish, but picked up enough to get by. («¿Dónde está el baño?» ) For all the chaos and confusion and creole weirdness, I actually liked it. Well, except for the heat. And the humidity. And the cost of living. And the traffic. And the lousy job market. And you know, maybe it was time to move on.

So, I moved on. In August 2011, I relocated to the area around Washington, DC. Yes, summer in DC can be as hot and humid as Miami, but it has seasons. Yes, it has a high cost of living, but you get more for your money than just access to a sandy beach. Yes, the traffic can be awful, but there is a viable mass transit system. And yes, it can be just as chaotic and frustrating as Miami. However, it also offers opportunities which are much more in sync with my goals than Florida ever did. It feels good; as of this writing it's been fifteen very strange years.

Like most Americans, I’ve spent my share of time behind a cash register, having worked for both small retail outfits and national chains. I've managed two different specialty retailers (an adventure game shop and a comic store), with the unique challenges those environments bring. Eventually I moved to a jewelry wholesaler/importer, starting out in the warehouse doing packing and shipping. Eventually,seeming to be a reasinably bright fellow, I was given the chance to get their nascent computer systems going. I ended up teaching myself AT&T Unix System V on an AT&T 3B2/400. It’s a good thing I didn’t realize that doing so would be impossible (as I was later told), or I’d have never succeeded.

After several years of this and through a peculiar set of circumstances, I ended up back in retail again, working in the advertising department of the Florida-based Burdines department store chain. My computer experience — both those from my previous job and my own hobbyist skills — brought me to an IT management position. (As part of a corporate strategy, Burdines was later rebranded as Macy’s). I directed the team running the Lotus Notes email system, the intranet development group, and the divisional user support help desk, among a great many other areas. However, that’s just on paper. In reality, I spent a significant portion of my work day as the unofficial “director of ideas,” as one of the VPs phrased it, helping task forces look at projects and processes with a fresh perspective. If only I could put “Director of Ideas” on a business card.... (Remember business cards?)

After a major corporate restructuring, I — along with seven thousand of my peers — was laid off. Once the dust had settled, I spent time with my family and friends, picked up some new skills, researched the impact of connected technology on society, wrote a book (as yet unpublished), and provided technology consultation for small businesses and non-profits. This filled the time while I was looking for a new profession.

Before I begin, if you are looking for deep details — if you are considering me for a position, for example — visit me on LinkedIn, or just ask me for a copy of my résumé. This is just an overview for the idly curious, or people who think they might know me.

Good project management — good management in general, really — is all about communication. My time with the Florida/Puerto Rico region of Macy’s was a period of tremendous change in technology, and enabling those changes required much more than just writing code. In spite of facing an entrenched corporate skepticism about technology, through leadership and a willingness to understand the needs and concerns of the executives we deployed the company’s first intranet; moved from mainframe-based e-mail and reporting to PCs and business intelligence; and built not just an awareness of the benefits of technology, but a business model that eagerly embraced technology’s benefits.

If you’d like something a little more specific, my skills and experience include in no particular order: IT team management, including staff development and mentoring; project management; intranet design; content management system creation and maintenance; IT policy development; Windows NT server administration (including MS-SQL and IIS);  network planning and administration; technical writing and documentation; user support, including script-writing and support team management; internal marketing; and business continuity planning. I also co-produced an annual executive awards show, and did some work behind the microphone as an announcer, too.

At the end of 2013, I took a position providing communications work — technical writing, document editing, and more like that — for a behavioral health software company in Maryland. (As I said, if you’d like to know more, just ask.) I was with them for nearly 13 years, eventually taking charge of the company's knowledge bases, product release documentation, style guide, and a bunch of stuff I'm sure I'm forgetting. The company was eventually purchased by a venture capital firm and merged with two other behavioral health software companies, providing plenty of opportunities to meld very different corporate cultures under a single corporate communication style.

But as often happens, the mergers eventually led to layoffs, and I found myself facing the prospect of reinvention once again.

From an early age I have been involved in creative pursuits. I was dictating stories to my mother before I knew my ABCs, and by fifth grade I’d decided to be a writer. I complicated matters, though, by starting trombone lessons. Against the odds, I had a talent for music, so my musical and literary pretensions fought for years.

In middle school, high school, and college I played trombone, along with a lot of other instruments, and developed an abiding love of jazz in all its myriad flavors. I did a fair amount of composing and arranging, as well, always tending toward the avant garde. Apartment life brought my practicing to an end, though, and with that my musical career ground to a halt. I haven’t given up hope that I may return to it some day. I have a synthesizer keyboard at the ready for when that time comes. But now, the pen is mightier than the baton.

Writing has stayed with me. Bad poetry, occasionally acceptable poetry, fiction, journals, dream logs, reviews, technical documentation, corporate communications — if it involves stringing together letters into words and then into something approaching narrative or image, I’m there. When I first got access to a computer — back in the days of CP/M and Word*Star — I started writing even more; I could finally stop wasting reams of paper in rewrites every time I changed my mind about something. This helped me get in on the desktop publishing fad early, and for several years I self-published a small circulation 'zine called Ambergris from Leviathan.

My discovery of the Internet in the late ’80s moved my focus from paper publishing to electronic media. I learned to create web pages, and began putting my errant thoughts on-line for… well, probably no-one read them, but they were still published. Those were heady days, when web pages were pretty much all words and no pictures, and all you needed to create your own publishing empire was a computer, a phone line, a text editor,  and a strongly worded opinion.

In retrospect, it all fit together remarkably well. Music and writing are about communication, about reaching the hearts and minds of other people. The promise of the Internet remains an unprecedented ease of self-expression, finding an audience on the strength of your talent, skill, and passion.

I invest my time, money, and thought in support of various causes. I’m particularly interested in free speech, LGBTQI+ issues, animal care, literacy, voting reform, reproductive rights, social justice, and health care reform, but I could go on for days without running out of groups you should support. I also invest in crowdfunding campaigns for arts projects and games I'll never get around to playing. (I should probably start a 12-step program for Kickstarter.) Wherever I land, I try to make the world a better place for the people around me.

What causes do you believe in?

So, am I the Marc Kevin Hall you were looking for? If so — or hey, even if not — get in touch with me! I mean, if you read all the way to the end, you are clearly someone I want to know.

Discord (sometimes) — mkhall#1632
Instagram (occasionally) — marckevinhall
X (very rarely) — mkhall
Threads (more often) — @marckevinhall@threads.net
BlueSky (often) — @mkhall.bsky.social
Mastodon (do I even still have this?) — mkhall@mastodon.social
Gmail (too often) — mkhall@gmail.com

Plus any number of other channels, usually as mkhall or marckevinhall.

Thanks for reading!