For the failure of his first marriage Mahmoodi blamed himself; or rather, he blamed the rigid, logical mind-set his work had engendered. If you work for 14, 15 hours, doing coding and designing, you become that computer. You become a logical thing, and everything in your life becomes logic. So now, as we know, not everything in life is logic. Reality is different. Just five weeks into his second marriage, Mahmoodi sensed destructive pressures building again. He was afraid. If I continue thinking like a computer, probably I'm going to destroy this marriage. So I'm tired of computers. I just want to get out of computers. I want to just get out and go do something for myself. The time is now.
That night, he came home and gave Parisa the news.
The first two weeks they were in Phoenix, Mike, Parisa, and Ramin lived with Parisa's aunt and uncle. The men were full of plans. Parisa's uncle owned a local chain of family restaurants. He was looking to expand into pizza. Mahmoodi -- illogically, perhaps, but that was the new Mahmoodi -- became his partner.
Mahmoodi was a pizza neophyte. The interesting part of it was that I had no experience with pizza. I mean, I hated pizza. At NASA he had played a part in the conquest of space; now he was negotiating with pepperoni suppliers. Mahmoodi was willing to work, though, and he had a flair for promotions. To compete with the national chains, he came up with the idea of offering two pizzas with one topping for a fixed price. The first night his two-for promotion aired on local television, he ran out of dough and had to unplug the phones. One pizza joint became two, and two became half a dozen.
Parisa and Ramin were sucked into the cyclone of growth. Nights, Parisa helped deliver pizzas, while Ramin slept in the backseat of the car. Ramin soon learned that if he stuck his head out the window at the appropriate time and called for his mother, Parisa often got a better tip. So that became part of the routine. And by the time Ramin was 5, he could make dinner for himself at his father's restaurant: his own topping on his own little pizza.
It was Parisa who began the family discussion that would end, shortly, with Mike's recognizing that the pendulum of his career had swung too far in the opposite direction. She saw plainly that he was out of his element. Mahmoodi let himself be persuaded. I realized I had so many experiences, so many years of computers, this pizza place was not for me. Ten months after moving to Phoenix, he answered a newspaper ad that led to a job at MicroAge Inc., developing an electronic order-filing system that would unite the giant distributor's far-flung affiliates.
Things would get worse before they got better. Mahmoodi was working two jobs now: days as a programmer at MicroAge (for less than half the salary he had given up at NASA) and nights tending to his pizza business, pending its sale. On Mike's 31st birthday, Parisa planned a surprise. She and Ramin baked a cake together and waited up for him to come home. It was after midnight when he walked through the door. Parisa greeted him and went into the kitchen to light the candles on the cake. By the time she returned, he had fallen asleep at the dining-room table.
In time, though, the move seemed to be paying off. Mahmoodi sold the pizza business at a small profit. He was promoted to MIS director at MicroAge. His salary climbed back toward six figures. Parisa, meanwhile, reenrolled at Arizona State and resumed work on her own degree in computer science. By August 1989 Parisa was feeling secure enough to set aside $1,000 from her summer-job earnings and plan a small vacation. They flew to Mobile, joined friends Mike had not seen since college, and drove all the way to Miami. Parisa enjoyed herself that week. Life was settling into a stable, comfortable, happy routine, and she was grateful for that. So she was not really prepared when, two months later, Mike quit his job at MicroAge.
Why now? Mahmoodi was comfortable, but comfort wasn't enough. Comfort couldn't compensate for all he'd been through. Go back to my Dad. He said, "Be someone, be somebody, do something that should be recognized everywhere." Here it was, more than two decades since his father had died, and still Mahmoodi was not recognized, not even by his mother. In Iran it was as if he did not exist. No one cares, no one likes you, no one loves you, you are a big mistake, you have done wrong. In America, he was a foreigner, forever on the margin. You know how many times I've tried to talk the American way? I cannot.
The danger at MicroAge was that Mahmoodi might never rise above the crowd, no matter how much he accomplished. That was his main fear, and it was still his motivation. If I want to be someone who people know, I've gotta start something. What other options do I have? Do you hear "successful programmer"? Not very often. But you hear "successful businessman." You hear "entrepreneur."
The idea that would become NIE International (the acronym stands for National Inventory Exchange) had been in the back of Mahmoodi's mind for the past couple of years. He knew from his experience at MicroAge that demand for computer parts was quirky, regional, and impossible to predict. Local parts suppliers and service companies couldn't win. What you had on hand, you couldn't sell; what you could sell, you didn't have on hand. Mahmoodi saw an opportunity for a matchmaker. For a fee, NIE would bring buyers and sellers together and then step aside and let them cut a deal. Mahmoodi would develop the software to track inventory at multiple sites; NIE's cofounder, Jack Rhodes, a former colleague at MicroAge, would handle sales and marketing.
