Bio

As UniServEnt, my current nom de plume for Martin Gibson, I have been doing business as a self employed professional in the design, construction and risk management field for over 40 years. That makes me an expert, if only for staying alive this long. I am an expert in a few other things as well, but that is only because I am an amateur in so many other things – an idiot according to the original Greek meaning of that word. It takes a lot of time and concentrated effort to understand and thereby master certain skills, and that leaves an individual a lot of time deficiency and inattention to details in other areas with which to cultivate idiocy. Expertise is at the same time a much valued and much denigrated quality in an individual, depending on who might be assessing that fact in others. It is best to remember there are no experts or idiots in everything.

What I will state as the truth is that we are all experts in being our selves, experienced as souls—as gods in the process of learning by trial and error that we are beings and not things. Prone to error, that makes us ergods involved in some measure of ergodidiocy in our common endeavor as ergodidiots. Of the many that realize this truth, I am one. Pluribus, sum unum.

I did not go to college to become a self employed—often self unemployed—individual DBA Unified Services Enterprise, any more than I did so to become a professional or an expert. I went to college because, as the son of a professional engineer and builder, that was the general expectation, and I was curious about what I might learn at university about life and the universe in general and—well, about having fun. I had no concept of being shoehorned into a career.

I was planning on astrophysics as a major when I went to college for the simple reason that I was interested in the big picture, but then I ended up with a degree in economics because it was novel territory and promised to yield its secrets to quantitative analysis. Well, maybe. It was only after college that I settled in to the design and construction business with my dad by default, before eventually segueing to the catastrophe insurance adjustment business. As a builder I picked up the necessary hands-on framing and finish carpentry skills, and with the ability to think and design in 3D, some programming and data processing experience. And as my name to some might suggest, I developed an interest in playing the guitar along the way.

Life as a self employed catastrophe adjuster tends to be an on-again, off-again occupation. It can be lucrative when it is on—and emotionally satisfying helping people who have suffered a loss, enough so that it generally makes up for the bureaucratic idiocy one encounters—but it precludes most other part-time gigs. During this downtime over the past 30 years, having given up playing the guitar—until recently—I have sought and found comfort in the company of my wife and family and friends and in applying the quantitative, and qualitative, analytical skills I have learned over the years to certain topics of interest in the sciences and political economics—and lastly and most significantly, in an ever growing awareness of the transcendent primacy of Life.

UniServEnt, as found in the mission statement, is an attempt at a Unified professional approach to various Services over these years of entrepreneurial Enterprise and independent investigation. I will try to keep the subject matter of this site germane, accessible, and of good humor, but expertise, like beauty—and perhaps idiocy—resides in the eyes of the (idiotic?) beholder.