Manager Swaps California for Carolina

Mike Maziar was picking his way through the late rush-hour traffic on the Orange Freeway last summer when a thought came to him. He had been commuting two to three hours a day for more than 10 years, fighting rude drivers and stalled traffic and the memory of a horrific accident that still sticks in his mind: a woman thrown from her speeding car; the car rolls over her again and again.

Something had to give soon, Maziar thought. “There’s got to be more to life than this,” he found himself muttering.

A week later his employer, furniture maker PCI/Tandem Inc., told workers it was moving from Buena Park to Greensboro, N.C. Most of the 60 employees were dismayed. But not Maziar, a middle manager. This could be what he was looking for, he thought. He quickly decided to go with the company.

“Things had been piling up,” he says now from North Carolina. “In the previous three months, my car had been broken into and my golf clubs stolen. A guy had jumped the wall in our back yard while we were in the Jacuzzi, and he looked like he was going to rob the place. The guy down the street had been held up in his house in broad daylight. There was a shooting at my little girl’s grammar school! They started having shooting drills, just like we used to have fire drills.

“And then there was that commute. Every day. For years.”

Maziar, 34, moved to North Carolina at the end of the year. He paid $136,000 for his new house, or $10,000 more than his house in Fontana had cost. (San Bernardino County was one of the closest places to Buena Park where Maziar could afford a house.) But for the extra money, he got a four-bedroom house in North Carolina that was twice as big as his old one--2,100 square feet versus 1,100.

Maziar and his wife don’t have enough furniture to fill all the rooms. “We’ve even got a bigger yard,” he says. “You couldn’t buy this house for $500,000 if you moved it to Buena Park.”

But things aren’t perfect in North Carolina. Getting the plant up and running and hiring and training new people has not been easy. “People here will say, ‘It’s going to snow, so I’ve got to go home,’ ” Maziar says. “They’re good workers, but sometimes I miss our old employees.”

Some of the transplanted executives have had a tougher time adjusting to North Carolina, says Maziar. And he, too, misses some things about California: pro sports, mostly, and the Jacuzzi. His 10-year-old daughter, eldest of three, misses her old friends and is homesick. He knows the coming summer will be muggy and hot and that the nearest mountains and beaches are several hours’ drive away. Both he and his wife left family behind in California.

“But my kids know who I am now when I come through the door,” he says. “I spend more time with my family instead of driving all the time. The other day I got home at 6 o’clock; my kids wanted to know if I’d been fired.

“I wasn’t put on this earth to drive 45 miles to work every day. The stress of that commute was terrific. And now it’s gone.”