Back When I Was The Tech Guy

by Sophie

TECHNOLOGY

I've publicly bemoaned the fact that I got a degree in computer science, circa 1980-something, a field for which I was neither suited nor destined.

I know why I chose it, however. I was very concerned about supporting myself. Finances were tight in the house I grew up in, and end-of-month money worries were common, and I was very certain I wanted to grow up and never have to battle that sort of worry again.

I got a great job after graduation. I worked for Arthur Andersen - remember them? I wore navy and gray suits with those eighties bow blouses (younger sisters, cover your eyes) and the fussy pins we used to wear at our collars. Nude pantyhose, and Reeboks that we'd change for pumps outside the building - because we weren't allowed to have sneakers on "in the workplace."

(Side note: Junior dug up one of those pins, from 1982 (I know this because she found the date stamped on the back) - a Monet goldtone job shaped like a chevron. Gave me shivers, remembering how I used to choke on those starched blouses. Junior wears it a little different - at the waist of a cardigan knotted over a camisole. (Her style is a mix of Anthropologie and audrey hepburn so we're never quite sure what will coming waltzing out of her bedroom in the morning.)

Anyway, my first assignment was writing COBOL code for an IRS job. It was deadly dull. You'd run your job, and it would fail, and you'd take that two-pound green-and-white printout back to your desk, go through its accordion-folded entirety, drink four Tabs in a row, try something else, repeat.

After that was a stint at the New York Port Authority. More COBOL, more exciting location. Then I got really crazy and became a Novell LAN administrator, a gig that saw me through the remainder of my Anderson days and into my next job, in Philadephia where I'd moved with my future husband. Academics suited me okay, and I ran Novell networks at Penn and then at Northwestern in Chicago, and kept doing so until I quit to stay home with my kids.


The early Novell LANS were an exercise in frustration. There was a lot of coax cable - stuff that makes today's T1 look like gossamer spider webs by comparison. The hubs looked like they came from the set of the original Star Trek, ungainly things with a pebbled beige powder-coated metal surface identical to the unpleasantly hollow sounding boxes that housed the early IBM PCs. You'd plug everything in, say an incantation over the server (a $15,000 computer with less smarts than your kid's phone) - squeeze your eyes shut in heart-fluttering hope and trepidation - flip the switch aaaaaaaand -

Nothing.

A whole lot of nothing. It never worked, not until you'd stayed until 3am many nights in a row, often enough to catch your boss banging one of the recent hires in the conference room, often enough to get completely behind on Moonlighting, often enough that your diet was 70% vending machine food.



I usually waited until most of the other staff were gone before I cried, and I bruised my knuckles beating on the damn LAN parts. Also, crawling around the floor in a suit and heels meant that I went through a lot of pantyhose.

Yeah, I was pretty bad at the whole thing, it's true. But I was making good money. Good enough for a high-rise apartment, a charge account at Marshall Fields, a drawer full of Lancome, six-week highlight touch-ups.

A certain kind of happiness, I won't lie.

These days I'm living far more austerely than I did when I was half this age, but my work brings me so much more satisfaction. I have, ahem, a mac, so it does everything for me, and my relationship with technology is what I would call "cordially distant." I am happy to pay the Comcast guy, my web designer, a backup service, even my kids so that I don't have to get involved in any of the technology.

I don't have regrets, really, about my first career. But I'm more than happy that it's in the past now, and I'm doing what I was truly meant to do.