It has been a fast-paced two years since I started on September 2014 as the new General Manager. I’ve enjoyed meeting many of you and look forward to meeting many more residents of Sun City Shadow Hills. It is a pleasure to work here and with you, and I hope that together we can continue to make Sun City Shadow Hills the best place to live at in the Coachella Valley.
As a matter of fact, you’ve made the Sun City Shadow Hills Montecito and Santa Rosa Clubhouses the best clubhouses, not only in the Coachella Valley, but in the nation. The website, www.55places.com, the most visited website for active adult communities when searching for a new home, voted the Sun City Shadow Hills Montecito and Santa Rosa Clubhouses the Best Clubhouses in the nation in June 2016.
Speaking about great spaces, by the time you read this article our expansion of the HOA building should be complete. We have added a new conference room for the Board, committees, and clubs to meet in. We have also added two new offices to properly accommodate staff working conditions; we really had a staff member working out of a closet, which was originally designed to be a restroom.
If you were not aware I did not have an office for approximately six weeks during the construction. I was working out of a suitcase and a laptop. Sometimes I could not connect my laptop to the Wi-Fi so I had to use my cell phone to send/receive emails and create documents.
This experience reminded me that many of you accomplished much more difficult tasks than just writing emails without the use of computers, laptops, and cell phones, and for that I applaud you. This experience also reminded me of an experience from my youth… When I was around 11 years old, one of my friend’s fathers, Mr. Ponce, was a programmer working for IBM. When I would visit my friend, sometimes his father would be working from his home office, where he had two or three refrigerator-size processors with a green screen with the huge hump in the rear of it. Mr. Ponce would tell me, “One day everyone will have these computers in their homes.” My reply to him was, “Why would anyone occupy a whole room with these huge metal boxes?” “No, no, ‘C’ (that was my nickname), these metal boxes will be the size of your lunch box one day.” Well, I think we are here now. Computers are smaller than my lunch box when I was 11 years old and they’re so complicated I have to pay my 9-yearold daughter to install apps and change the settings on my cell phone.
But I’m still waiting for the flying cars I saw on the Jetson’s cartoon show.