The first job I got out of college was the position of “Assistant Manager” at Radio Shack. It sounds more glamorous than it actually was. We had two types of customers: the know-it-all customers and the know-nothing customers.
While things I see have given me nightmares, it’s my sense of hearing that seems to dig deeper into my brain. Certain sounds instantly generate that primitive fear “fight/flight” response.
Finally, I started getting an actual error: Invalid Subscript Reference. That wasn’t too helpful. The official definition of the error was a subscript reference was not found.
The good news is we could copy this virtual machine pretty easily and set it up somewhere else as a test bed. The bad news is their machine was in pretty sorry shape. At the best of times, it’s difficult to isolate a single piece of software to check it for problems. Even when a computer is “idle” there may be three dozen processes running in the background.
It was one of those old school steakhouses done up in Early American Dungeon. Everything was brick and wrought iron with thick wooden beams stained dark like walnut. Each booth came equipped with a small lamp with a bulb about the size of the one in a refrigerator.
The longest “tweet” you can write is only 140 characters long. I had a nasty case of writer’s block for ten years; I don’t need any help in not-writing. Besides, how much can you really say in 140 characters? If this blog were a tweet, I would have ended at “The longest tw”.
The men’s room door had a very official looking number pad on the door. I was issued a five digit code in order to gain entry. That’s one digit more than grants you access to the WOPR in War Games. I was prepared to be impressed.
The client’s server room was an actual room about the size of a garage. The servers were all late model machines of the same make. They were housed in matching system racks. Everything was neat and clean. I felt like I had stepped into an ad for IBM.
Indianapolis is surrounded by a loop of expressways that all end in “65″. You have to be careful whether you go north or south because – while you can’t really get lost – you can end up seeing a lot of the city before you reach your final destination.
I was one of two crewmembers running the technical aspects. We’d switch off every episode. One week I’d run the switcher and the audio board, the next I would run both cameras. It was a typical local access show: the set consisted of two chairs and a plant.
I was onsite at a client not too long ago. We were in the middle of an install to a new server and had to load up an application from a CD. No problem, I was told by the IT tech I was working with. He was going to stick the CD into the drive on his machine and share it with the server. We wouldn’t have to leave his cubicle. He set up the share and connected remotely to the server. To his surprise, he couldn’t see the CD or his drive. He tried it again. Nothing.
I did have access to the station van. I also used it for donut runs in the middle of the night. “Station business” was a nebulous term; the way I saw it, WPGU ran on donuts, coffee and cigarettes just as much as electricity.
I kept my Diet Pepsi on a table reserved for meetings in the middle of the room. It was far away from the equipment and I only paused for a moment here and there to partake. I’d like to credit how smooth it went to my skills as a consultant, but I was also a little lucky. Their new server was pretty peppy and their IT staff was too busy putting out fires to ask me a lot of questions.
I don’t think the term “fanboy” was in vogue at the time, but we all knew what it meant and we took great pains to avoid it. None of us wanted to be caught gasping like a fish in the presence of someone famous. I can remember one time when fame overwhelmed us all.
It’s desert dry in the house in the winter. Meka gets nosebleeds and I sound like I’ve been smoking menthols since the Johnson Administration. Over the weekend, the normal dryness in my throat began to feel scratchy. By Monday it felt like I was swallowing shards of broken glass.
I used to work for an alien. He didn’t come right out and say he was an alien. He never pulled his face off or tried to eat me or anything like that. But I had my suspicions from the beginning…
The Church of the Livingstone and Mission for the Coming Days sent out a press release the world was due to end on October 28, 1992, at midnight, Korean time. The world was still around at 12:01, Korean time, but we played R.E.M. anyway.
A policeman tapped on my passenger window and motioned me to turn around. The road was closed until further notice. I gingerly did a three point turn. The Volvo behind me turned less gingerly and ended up doing a double 360 off the side of the road. Luckily, the police were nearby.
I was a bit groggy, even with the 44 ounce Diet Pepsi I picked up on my way out of town. I had this feeling I was forgetting something, but I couldn’t think of anything obvious. I had my laptop in my backpack. I had my meeting notes and training materials. I had packed my suitcase and was reasonably sure I had socks and underwear for the duration.
The first Star Trek movie is definitely falls under the definition of guilty pleasure; I feel a little guilty for liking it! My favorite part of the movie is when the Starship Enterprise finally confronts the gigantic alien probe that is heading towards Earth. The scene consists of approximately forty-seven minutes of special effects intercut with brief shots of the crew of the Enterprise staring at forty-seven minutes of special effects.
It was right after church. I stopped at Office Depot to pick up some paper and generally look around. I was gazing longingly at the laser printers when a young woman interrupted my train of thought.
We meet in a banquet room on the second floor. Two walls of windows give us a great view of the golf course. When I started going in January, it was no big deal. There’s nothing bleaker than a large empty expanse of field covered in snow under a steel gray sky and bracketed by the skeletons of trees.
Considering my dad is a pretty conservative guy, he’s always had it in for “The Man”. Those petty people with power just stick in his otherwise non-communist-leaning craw. I came out to visit the other week and he had to tell me all about his latest run in with The Man. This time – though – The Man was a woman.
So, I went on the Internet and pulled up one of those “last minute deals”. I ended up finding a place for $35 a night. I got two rooms essentially for the price of one.
I got up there late Sunday night. I couldn’t see the place very well in the dark, but it was the last entrance on a dead end street. There were no cars in the lot that I could see. I walked in and felt like a kid again.
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I traveled a lot, so I wasn’t at my desk more than once a week or so. Since I was hardly there, I was the low man on the totem pole (at least as far as cubicles were concerned). I went through three cubicles in less than three months. It wasn’t that I was wearing them out, I would get moved around as new people were hired that were working in the office all the time. I would find this out when I would show up and almost sit in someone’s lap.
I had fallen asleep in my motel room with ESPN on and unfortunately it was one of those paid programming shows kicking off at 5:00 in the morning. As I came to, I realized two things.
1) Who wants to know about the amount of fecal matter left in their colon at 5:00 in the morning?
2) Who wants to know about the amount of fecal matter left in their colon… ever?
I find myself walking around with the phone and a charger, so I can plug it in a wall socket anywhere I go; kind of defeats the purpose of a cell phone in my opinion.
“What the f— is going on?” I yelled at McFly. “What are you guys doing back here?” McFly didn’t answer me right away. He had big eyes that bugged out normally, but they bugged out even farther now. And he wasn’t looking at me, but rather at a point just slightly above my left shoulder. He slowly lifted his arm to point at something behind me and I will never forget the mixture of fear and awe in his voice as he tried to answer my question.
“Dude…”
Now, the problem was that my job which used to take 40 – 50 hours a week to manage was taking me something like 20 minutes a day. Not good. I was busy paying off my college loans and saving up for my first new car. I learned a very valuable lesson when dealing with large corporations: if you aren’t busy, you need to appear busy.
When I worked at WPGU, we were crammed into the basement of Weston Hall, one of the dorms down by the football stadium. I knew – of course – that there would be little trace of WPGU there. They had moved out of The Basement in the 1995. But still, I didn’t expect that it was all gone. They had even bricked over the door!
