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.
