After four or five months of training to learn how to manage a multidimensional dictionary based database and program for it, the time came when I could move out of the office I’d built behind the garage and into a “real” one a few miles away. As became a regular feature of employment, I helped with the move on my own dime. We cleared out the big city office rental, leaving it reeking of stale cigarettes. All the desks, terminals, and other vital office stuff we trucked to a building close to my house.
Primarily made from cubicle waste and leftover fencing, I assembled a playhouse in my back yard
Some of the cubicles were destroyed and sent to the land fill, but only after I’d stripped useful components. They were made with real plywood which I brought home and made into a playhouse. The main posts of the thing were made of landscaping border wood which turned out to be pretty flexible, so I included lots of bracing. It was quite the creation with it’s two story design.
July 4th, 1991 was the day we moved the stuff into the new building and I got my first real office. Almost exactly 23 years later, I’ve received my final paycheck from that income source.
I was programming and providing system support for a small office that ran our home brew software. My job was to keep their little network of terminals and the computer that connected them working the way they expected. Plus, I worked to improve the software they were using. Sometimes I had to make site visits which was always a pleasant thing. At first, it was all mystery so the boss who trained me would come along and diagnose and fix whatever was wrong, doing so in such a way that the mystery began to evaporate. He was methodical, following a systematic course of analysis of cause and effect, always verbalizing each step with it’s considerations and conclusion.
Considering that electrons can not be seen, I thought it was miraculous. While they can not be seen, they do leave evidence. It began to be fun : )
Reported problems began to fall into three categories: fingers, software defects, and hardware anomalies.
People were at the root of the greatest share of problems. They either enter strange things at the keyboard, don’t enter things they should enter, or touch things they shouldn’t touch. I observed that most computer problems could be traced to one of ten things, only two if you’re a pecker (a two finger typist). They shut down the computer while data is being written, delete what shouldn’t be, or invent unheard of vexations of their own.
Software is never finished. At best, it’s like a well sorted vintage car. Shortcomings will be uncovered forever and proper maintenance is essential.
Hardware, the terminals and keyboards and such, will fail. That’s inescapable. Sooner or later, they all fail.
So I finished my essential training in the fire so to speak.
The office window faced the parking lot of a medical office. The doctor was said to be in a country band and his son was a soap opera star. The doc showed up outside from time to time, a small man with a grey suit and as close to a mullet as one can legally get without it being for sure.
That window provided much intertainment because my desk faced it.
Prisoners would occasionally show up in a van with the entire bunch in orange jump suits. I’m told that is the color for the most dangerous ones criminals, which made them all the more interesting. The shackles reinforced that the color meant something. Their bindings clearly were not to keep them from picking their noses.
Civilians came there also, such as the two obese women I saw emerge from the clinic with a young girl in tow and an infant in arm.
Actually, the infant was pinched under one of their arms, drooped at the pinch point so it’s head and arms dangled along with it’s legs while being cradled by friction from the flesh in the vicinity of where an arm pit would be if such individuals had one. The baby looked like a doll. There was so much to capture my attention. I look at faces. The little girl looked normal with her shoulder length dark brown hair and thin build. Both women had the deep set eyes that sometimes come with a face where there is so much adipose build up that the socket seems recessed. Never had I seen an apron of flesh hang from a belly low enough to slap a leg each time a step was taken.
As a peered at this new sight, fully absorbed in the richness of details, the woman went to unlock the car door. Suddenly she looked up, straight at my window. Lightning fast with no forethought to do so, I closed the blinds. My pulse was racing and I don’t know why.
There is no disgrace in being large but in this case it was mersmerizing.
A goofy looking fellow showed up regularly to take boxes of biowaste and drop something off. To this day the fellow does that. He went from looking like a character in a Peter Sellers movie to to now resembling a disney octogenarian.
Many of the nurses that worked there in the early nineties still emerge at the end of the shift and drive away.
My gig only lasted two years or so and then I was faced with a choice. I could leave or I could work at the other business that occupied the building under the leadership of “Dave”. His business was centered on bill collections, primarily medical and dental debt. He needed a collector.
The absolute last thing I wanted to do was work as a bill collector.
Actually, the second to the last was to be a collector. Being unemployed was even less desireable. So I gave it a try.
