Ponderings and Musings

In the fall of 1978, at age 10, I asked my mother what hell was and how that worked with reincarnation. My mom responded that she thought we were in hell right now and if we get it right this time, we won’t have to reincarnate again and go to heaven.

She was on to something.

I started my first “corporate” job on my 20th birthday. After a brief data entry position in Maynard (which I completed way ahead of schedule), I was hired at Digital Equipment Corporation in the Corporate Employee Communications Department in Concord, Mass. For the first couple of months I worked as an Administrative Secretary to the lead of the department. I was hired by one her liaisons, as she was on a one-month sabbatical at the time and the woman working in the support position had moved to another part of the company. After a few months I was moved to the position of “Department Coordinator III”. At 20 years old I provided tech support for the entire group of users. As communicators of varying degrees, they produced periodic newsletters, electronic communications, and other media based communiques for the entire company of over 200K employees. At the time, Digital was the 2nd largest computer company in the world.

I was hired into the position through the temp agency Manpower; I had aced their CBT, or Computer Based Training, in less than four hours. It was meant to be a week long course. They couldn’t believe I was finished with the course when I asked them what was next on the agenda during training week. They had me take a test and when I aced it they slipped me into the position that had opened up with the intent of moving me to a more technical position as soon as it became available.

At 20 years old and with little in the way of a college education, people were amazed at my “knack” for computers. In my spare time I had already written a point of sale program that ran on the Commodore 64, TRS-80 Model II, and the Apple III, and had made a little bit of cash by selling it as shareware on various Bulletin Board Services across the country. Even though I was a geek through and through, I had very little knowledge in the way of the corporate world. I knew I had to wear a tie, shave everyday, and be as focused and humble as possible. I look back and I was a mess. Once in a while I’ll see a rerun of “Murphy Brown” and her disasters of temporary secretaries and think that must have been based on me. I was much more comfortable when I moved into the tech support role, though I did set alarms off more than once by messing around on the server clusters after hours.

At Digital (we never called it “DEC”) the motto was it was easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. And I used that to my advantage. A lot. I still live by that today.

I can’t believe it’s been 30 years since I took the opportunity to leave the company and pursue whatever life had next on my agenda. Occasionally I’ll have dreams of living and working back in Massachusetts, settling into my old role in my old cubicle, armed with today’s knowledge but still using the old VT-330 terminal connected to the server cluster on the first floor. In these recurring dreams I’m often laughing with my former co-workers. I like to think that one of my strongest assets was to make my co-workers laugh, even when stress levels were through the roof. My weirdness wasn’t obnoxious, it was humorous, and if any of my former co-workers remember me, I hope they remember me like this: “He had a weird knack for figuring out problems by looking for patterns. And he was so pleasant to work with”.

A lot of what I know today as a corporate citizen in the 21st century is rooted in what I learned in Concord, Mass. in the late 1980s. I don’t know what happened to that old team, but if I ever get the chance, I’d like to say thank you to Anne, Jim, Richard, Jennifer, Meg, Ann, Janine, Kate, Dawn, Barbara, Ellin, Donna, Beth, Marilyn, Carol, Karen, Marie, Erline, and Marny for all your support, your patience, and your knowledge.

You helped me find my path. And even 30 years later, you make me smile as if it was just yesterday.

This is a glimpse of the corner of my desk in my home office. I relocated the stack of masks I had sitting in the corner of the desk because they were just adding to the clutter of the space and I found them distracting.

You’ll see a couple of cases and a pouch for eyeglasses. My regular glasses don’t work as well for writing code as they did three years ago so I have a couple pairs of “cheaters” to use when my eyes are tired. Staring at a computer screen for 10 hours a day can’t be good for the eyes.

Overall I like my workspace. One of the reasons we chose this condo is because it had a separate office, something not found in most of the condos in this building. I’ve been working from home for 10 years and I absolutely love the flexibility of doing so and the space I work in. I need to be vigilant about keeping things tidy or else I start to feel unfocused.

One of the biggest distractions I constantly deal with is the laptop provided by work. The company I work for is all in on Windows 10, even though it’s Linux in the background doing all the heavy lifting. While I used to get excited about Microsoft Windows, I find Windows 10 to be cumbersome and unpredictable. There are too many consumer features that are never used on this work laptop. We do have the option of bringing our own device to work, and I could use a Mac again if I wanted to, but my job is too busy to devote time to the care and feeding of using my personal laptop for work. So I make do.

Truman has a routine of sleeping at my feet for a couple of hours each afternoon. This is in direct contrast of yelling at the top of his lungs each morning during my morning sprint and team calls.

He likes to be helpful.

I have always been interested in space, the stars, and the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in our galaxy. My first entry in the Elementary School Science Fair was in grade five. I made a presentation on UFOs. I’m seen here pictured next to a model I built out of paper plates and construction paper, based on a report I read about a sighting in Minnesota in 1976.

As an avid “Star Trek” fan, I have hopes that someday humanity will be be able to reach other solar systems at warp speed and that we’ll eventually make contact with our sentient species. I’ve always felt like the movie “Contact” probably came closest to what first contact will be like. I am hopeful that I will live long enough to see humans make contact with other intelligent species. We have a few more decades to accomplish this task.

So many science fiction novels and space operas are fueled by the concept of Earth being invaded by aliens, as if the only reason they’d cross many light years in incredibly advanced ships is to steal about F-16s and hover over our nuclear power plants. I’m often perplexed by these UFO sighting reports where witnesses say a craft came from a very far away destination to our planet just to blink its lights in the atmosphere. The visitors must want something other than to blink their lights at us, but I don’t believe they’d come all this way for purely hostile intentions.

I recently article that randomly popped up in my Apple News feed suggested that extraterrestrial visitors must be following some version of Star Trek’s Prime Directive, which boils down to this: “No human (or member of Starfleet) shall interfere with the natural progression and evolution of an alien species”.

This makes sense to me.

Can you imagine if aliens did arrive here? Many Americans can’t even handle folks coming into the country from Mexico, how in the world would they be able to handle the idea of beings coming from another world? For many it would instantly invalidate their religious beliefs. It would be an incredibly humbling experience, as it would turn out that humans aren’t the latest and greatest of “God’s” inventions after all. I’ve read more than one story that suggested there would be an incredible increase in suicide, because of the negation of these deeply rooted beliefs of humans being the most supreme creatures in the universe. If alien visitors can get to us but we can’t get to them then we’ve still got a lot of growing and evolving to do.

Perhaps aliens keeping their visits completely secret is their way of keeping our society intact.

Those that have reported contact with extraterrestrial visitors in relation to UFO sightings talk about being shown or taught things like devastating weather events, oceans taking over the land masses, and other ecological decay. Could it be the visitors are warning us of the dangers of man made climate change? Are they trying to nudge us in a better direction without causing the chaos of scaring the natives with the knowledge of their existence?

So many questions.

It is my hope that when we make contact with another intelligent species, that it’s done in an amicable, cooperative way. As mentioned in the Star Trek movie “First Contact”, learning we’re not alone in the Universe humanity hope to better itself because it learns we’re not alone.

What a glorious thing that would be.

This is not my mother and father. This photo is from an archived ad for the Great Lakes Mobile Home Company, and the photo shows the kitchen layout of a late 1950s Great Lakes mobile home.

We lived in a 1959 Great Lakes mobile home until I was nine years old. My dad built a two-story colonial-style house in the hayfield across the street and we moved there the day before I started in the fourth grade.

The mobile home was not big. I believe the official dimensions were 10’x50′. The stove in the photo is white, our stove and refrigerator were turquoise. When my sister was on the way, my Dad built an addition, adding a living room, small laundry room (with only room for the dryer, the washing machine was in the bathroom), and another additional bedroom. The addition was 8’x40′. The old living room became the dining room, because if you look at the kitchen in the photo above, there wasn’t really room for four people at a kitchen table for dinner, though I remember us doing just that. The table would be pulled out into the middle of the kitchen.

Apparently the clothes dryer was in the kitchen prior to Dad building the addition but I don’t really remember that. I have no idea where they would have put it.

When I was little the trailer seemed decently sized. I had the former master bedroom and my sister’s crib was in the little bedroom behind the living room. When she outgrew the crib my bed was replaced by bunk beds because the little bedroom didn’t even have enough room for a single bunk bed.

I remember riding out a couple of pretty intense winters in the mobile home before moving across the street. I remember the sound of rain on the metal roof and the windows between the new living room and the former living room. When the addition was built, the common wall with the mobile home was the original exterior wall. I didn’t find this odd.

The structure that defines your house does not define your home. It’s the people inside that make the home, and I remember a very happy home in our trailer.

Even though it’s been 19 years, I still remember the events of 9/11 as if it was yesterday. I remember standing in the video editing room of the advertising agency watching the events unfold on a television monitor. I remember scrambling to get the radio station to full time news coverage. I remember the sinking feeling in my stomach as the buildings came down.

Most of all, I remember thinking, life will never be the same again.

Those thoughts have been proven to be true. It’s felt the country has been completely off the rails since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the results of those attacks have snowballed into a country that is barely recognizable 19 years later.

Much has changed since 2001. Some of it good, too much of it bad. There is now an entire generation that has never known a United States that wasn’t at war.

I still get a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes when I think of the brave people that last their lives on that day, and their families and friends that had to carry on without them. I feel the same way about the country I once knew.

We all lost that day.