Will I work again, did I ever work?

I was cut loose from my first job at Earlham after five years. That was painful, and unwilling to do something that smacked of work I didn't settle for any job, because that first job wasn't like my concept of work, but rather joy that happened to pay well. It was a year or more before I started my second job with DEC. For most of that time, I had more than enough to keep me busy, and i learned a lot on my own, reading ACM publications that I have accumulated and not read, as well as finding many things in the library to read. The most memorable was the book by Friedman and Scwartz, A Monetary History of the United States.

After nearly a quarter century working for DEC in many capacities, but never enough, I a quick reentry doing what I had been doing impossible, as did many of my peers, so I decided on something of a career change. Back to my childhood when computers and robots were one and the same, scifi. I want computers that are in the real world, moving around, interacting with it.

Naively I took a welding class thinking "how hard can it be?" Whoa, that is real word, with a lot of technical stuff to know if you are doing the job right. But then I realized that sticking stuff together wasn't enough, so I took machine tool, cad, and eventually robotics and authomation, all at the NH Tech colleges, the most expensive such schools of all the States in the US. Still, relative to the kinds of courses common in the tech world, the course were relatively cheap, and paying my own medical makes just about anything else pale in comparison.

I have really grown to respect the other skilled jobs, and especially the trades and manufacturing. And I have grown to worry about the education system in our country and the reaction of industry to seek to bring in skilled labor from other countries rather than support training them in the US. And I have worked with many students, many more than a few years out of high school, and they are smart people, as smart as I in all the essential attributes, but they have been paid way less than I have relative to our relative knowledge and experience.

But back to the question at hand. Will I work again? Well, I haven't really had to work, so I'll be damned if I start now. But I do need to start generating income. But I also have more classes I want to take. How much longer can I go before I really must get paid?

Hey, why not do as the Republicans do? Borrow as much as i can to live today and then just let someone else pay it back after I'm dead....

One step at a time

Baby steps.

I created a blogger account more than a year ago, but have yet to post anything to it. It isn't because I'm at a loss for words, but rather than I have found forums to be more familar to the nearly two decades that I used DEC Notes at DEC,
|d|e|c|,
|d|i|g|i|t|a|l|,
a minicomputer maker that was more than a company or multinational corporation, but was a culture.

Who knows where this blog will lead. I had little idea what becoming part of dec would lead to, but it was an amazing journey, while it lasted. If only it had lasted a bit longer -- another five months would have been nice. In any case, I write this five years gone from dec, or to be correct, from compaq which bought dec and worked hard to eradicate it. However, it wasn't until a little less than five years ago that it became clear that dec was going to be erased from history with the announcement that HP was buying compaq.

bygones....

I've had two "real" jobs in my life, one at Earlham College and the second with dec. Both have had immence influence on the way I think and expanded my world to encompass so many interests that I can hardly accomplish anything. What I have been doing increasingly over the years, and especially in the past five years is writing.

Writing is certainly something that I learned at dec, not by training, but by doing. But then again, writing isn't something that you can learn from a book. Of course, writing requires thinking, and that I learned at Earlham, both in my short student life, and then from my five years working with students and faculty helping them with computer programming on an IBM 1130 in a number of new ways, new because computers were so new. More important then work was the culture of Earlham where the faculty and staff and students were encouraged to learn about everything. What I found as a non-student is that learning is fun and wonderful.

When I began working for dec, I found that there was so much exciting stuff to learn and the way it was presented was in well written and well organized literature. Over time, I became involved in engineering, and I was now creating the technology, and doing so by using the structure that I learned reading the dec technical literature. And I worked with people who all understood the value of writing and writing well - dec hired many writers and I became good friends with many.

One was Tom Parmenter who said to me "write like you talk", which baffled me for ages, but I always tried to figure out what he meant. Then a couple of summers ago I finally could avoid college composition no more, and I took the class from Bob Moulton and in his class I learned what my friend Tom meant. The most important thing I learned in that class, a class by the way that was held during the summer on a Friday night in a classroom that was often not air conditioned, what I learned was that I actually enjoyed writing. And I seem to have a passion for writing.

But I don't seem to have enough passion to find a way to make a living doing it. But what I might be starting here, and only time will tell what I'm starting, is an attempt to provide some structure to my writing. Perhaps some direction.