A few years passed before my boss revealed how the business was named and as soon as he did, the lingering question as to the origin of another of his business names was answered. They’re all takes on the guy’s last name, Bair. As in Polar Bair.

At first, my job was all about training. The tools I would use were altogether new to me. The lunchbox 286, a portable PC computer, was for learning how to program in Pick Basic. The sound of it’s hard drive was a delightful medley of faint notes, like muted taps on delicate crystal.

For months I reported to Mr. Bair’s spacious office. He gave me assignments and then let me fight my way to understanding by repeated failures. It was the usual first programming assignment: build an inventory program. Really, it was maddening at first. I didn’t understand database structure, programming algorithms, or the terminology. I read everything I could get my hands on that could cure my ignorance.

Most days, he brought a simple lunch in a new brown bag. He was known to be thrifty. Remembering my own brown bag days, I was puzzled.

“I used to get a month out of my bags,” I told him. He threw his away every time, practically new.

“One affords one’s self certain luxuries,” he told me as he tossed the bag. Possibly my observation annoyed him since brown bagging it was clearly beneath his station. My observation was the same as throwing away the value of that emblem of frugality when the man could obviously go out to a nice eatery and never wince at the cost.

After I’d gotten a basic understanding of programming constructs and the rest, Mr. Bair introduced me to the software they wanted me to support. It was a 4GL product with some nice features but no source code. Within two years, that fact would doom it. Then he showed me the office where the software he’d written with it was in use. It was a dentist office.

A bit at a time, the support we provided them became my baby. Sometimes they would have hardware issues that baffled me, so I’d have to just watch to see how Mr. Bair handled them. He was a diagnostician as much as any auto mechanic. The mystery would melt away each time. My confidence began to grow as I noticed that even though the computer just sits there and either works for annoys the user, there were common sense ways to sort out details and pinpoint exactly the cause of the problem then set it right.

This was a great relief to me because until I saw him do this with success, I doubted it could be possible to find and fix a problem whose cause could not always be seen or heard.

Eventually I learned that most computer problems can be traced to the same ten things: fingers.

A routine developed but I don’t remember if it was weekly or once a month. Mr. Bair had a spacious office where I would meet with him with my second boss, a fellow named David. Everyone but me called him Dave. For me to have done that would be akin to calling Catherine Hepburn, “Katie”.

David ran another business and my office was in his building. He and Mr. Bair owned the other business, a successful collection agency specializing in medical and dental debt. We always drove to Mr. Bair’s office together in David’s car.

We’d all meet up at Mr. Bair’s office with plenty of tractor fed paper and print statements and insurance forms for the one customer that I serviced. Talk radio filled the background along with the melodious noise from the impact printer. Then, after checking the numbers on some of the forms, we would tear off the perforated pages and fold and stuff them into envelopes.

My two bosses were clearly wired for business and were personal friends. I was just a hired hand. For some reason, their bantor and the work was enjoyable.

Typical of the rest of the business that David ran, Polar used strictly the most economical computer: an old 286 with a hard drive so loud that I wore earplugs. That did me little good, so I piled boxes of envelopes and insurance forms around it to mute the noise.

All good things come to an end, it seems. Dentists love technology and are known to embrace whatever new thing that comes along. Our client was anxious for more and better functionality using actual computers rather than monochrome terminals off a PC. Mr. Bair proved that he still had the stuff by writing a basic (no pun intended) scheduler for them since they wanted to move from paper to computerized appointment management. He researched and concluded that we could also provide bar code functionality.

It was all over my head so I was actually relieved when the word came that they’d go with another system already written to use modern hardware and already tested. That relief was tempered by the reality that with our one customer leaving us, there was no reason for Polar Software or me.

David offered to give me a try as a bill collector.

This did not at all appeal to me and I’d never seriously considered doing such work. The memory of that short gig as a telemarketer was still fresh. I lasted ten minutes and just got up and walked out.

The collectors were an unusual bunch. I could hear them outside my office comparing tat’s, telling their stories, and complaining. Sometimes one of them would ask about me and one of the others would tell her to stay away, “he’s with CUBS” (referencing another of Mr. Bair’s companies, the one that provided the collection software) so none of them ever talked to me.