CANADIAN Warren McKenzie (45) was puzzled when his wife's employers offered him a free trip from the US to Ireland, where she was doing some work.
"My trip paid for; why?" he asked Microsoft. "Well, you could do some house-hunting," came the reply. And so he realised that there was a real prospect of him and their then five-year-old son Jamie moving across the Atlantic in the wake of his wife Julia MacLauchlan (40).
Moving was nothing new to Julia and Warren. Since getting married 19 years ago, after meeting as students at the University of New Brunswick in eastern Canada, they have "relocated" about 13 times.
At first it was Warren's job, as director of development for Northern Telecom, that dictated their moves. In latter years it has been the turn of Julia's career to take precedence.
However, now running his own telecommunications consultancy, Warren was surprised to find that the move to Ireland opened up a lot of opportunities for his business in Europe. "I told Julia I was making a big sacrifice," he recalls. "But that's not the way it turned out - my business didn't miss a beat."
When they arrived in Ireland in 1993, they found they were regarded a little strangely. Neighbours in Bray, says Julia, just didn't believe Warren when he said he was here because of her job. "They thought that must be a front for something, like drugs," she laughs.
"I remember getting a taxi home to Bray and the driver asked what brought me to Ireland," says Warren. "When I told him my wife had been transferred, he said he'd never let his wife work. I replied that if I had wanted a door-mat I would have bought one. That didn't go down too well!"
Also, when Julia was entertaining clients at home, people were a little shocked to find out it was her husband who was doing the cooking. And she remembers a friend's housekeeper who was "scandalised" that Julia wasn't doing Warren's ironing, regardless of the fact that she was slogging all day in the office.
"That woman was in her 80s; we mostly found it was a generational thing," points out Warren.
As they settled in Ireland, Warren was struck by the "phenomenal" number of newspapers available. He loved to buy a selection each morning, read them and then walk down to Dixon's coffee shop on Bray's Main Street to discuss politics. Meanwhile, Jamie was very happy at Aravon school up the road.
However, after two years here, the three of them moved back to Redmond, near Seattle, with an invaluable Irish nanny, Diann Walsh (26) from Midleton, Co Cork, in tow. Now Julia spends about 10 days a month in Ireland and also regularly travels to Tokyo and Beijing. Warren is also back and forth to Europe for his business.
"We try not to be away at the same time," Julia explains. But with the help of computers, faxes and phones, they are in frequent contact with each other, no matter where they are in the world and whatever time zone.
"Jamie has his own computer but not his own modem and he's feeling very deprived," says Julia. Instead he rushes to the fax machine each morning for a message from his Mom on the move.
"I have a lot of flexibility," she says of her job as Microsoft's Director of Worldwide Products, Ireland, based in Sandyford, Co Dublin, where she is responsible for a total workforce of 900 in Ireland. "If there's a school play, I will be in the US. Microsoft is very good."
Considering their hectic travel schedules, Julia and Warren are only half joking when they greet the routine query of: "Where do you live?" with the reply: "On British Airways."
