[WARNING: L-O-N-G and potentially boring post.  Cut and run now.  You've been warned!]

Did you take that test at MSNBC to determine how digital you are?  I’m a respectable near-geeky 135.  Damn it, I’d have scored much higher had I a laptop and WiFi or high-speed internet.  I’d love to have them but the timing isn’t right; there’s sure to be a technology shift here in the next month or so in laptops.  I tried DSL but my connection speed was actually slower than my current dial-up; I’ll wait until we move to our new house to migrate to cable so I can wire up a LAN.

 

What’s scary is that most of the women I know will only understand the lack of a laptop and possibly the high-speed internet connectivity.  I don’t think of myself as being extremely wired compared to the average local woman; hanging here in the virtual world with other wired people distorts my perception of the population’s abilities.  Some of my readers live in extremely wired locales; they think nothing at all about “hot-spots”.  Here if you asked where the closest hot-spot could be found, you’re likely to get pointed to the closest nightclub or to something unseemly.  Be sure not to ask this of the average Jane on the street here…

 

The digital test only assesses one’s degree of connectivity; it doesn’t check your overall geek quotient, your level of intertwining with technology.  I’m no coder, but I’m pretty sure I could score fairly high on such a test.  Worse, I’m not certain at all how I found myself here in Geekdom; I’m not a typical geek, didn’t have the requisite pocket protector and slide rule and horned-rim glasses with the obligatory duct tape repair, nor did I wear Earth shoes and straight hair parted in the middle sans any styling.  Never mastered the slide rule, either.

 

I didn’t even play video games (I still don’t).  When I was in high school, my family got Pong and PacMan for my younger siblings; I couldn’t get into them.  At least they would amuse the kiddies while my boyfriends visited, leaving us alone in peace.  At that age I was all about boys; the short, sweet green-eyed blond one who kissed like an angel, the tall, dark, handsome and moody one, the adoring redhead who asked me to marry him when I was only sixteen.  Not exactly a prescription for geekdom, serially involved as I was with boy after boy. 

 

Not long ago I ran into a high school classmate who was a year younger than me; I hadn’t seen her in nearly twenty years.  We laughed about the class in which we were neighbors, nudging each other about our instructor as he slammed his way through the derivation of the natural log.  We could both remember that it had taken eighteen dusty lengths of chalkboard for him to complete the derivation, literally beating the chalk into the board leaving shards of chalk and a cloud of yellow powder hovering in the classroom.  Ah, good times.  She remembered being envious of my having a boyfriend – one who’d given me a Texas Instruments calculator.  Not just any TI, but one with a factorial button.

 

Wow.  I’d completely forgotten about that.  It was my first expensive present from a boyfriend; the redhead wanted to give me a promise ring to pledge his troth to me.  I put him off on the troth and told him it would be so much more helpful to have a TI, that one with the factorial button.  Voila, a sleek black calculator for my birthday, the envy of my trigonometry and calculus classmates.  I could have made a fortune if I’d charged for the use of that factorial button (which lasted far longer than the relationship to the clingy, sycophantic although generous redhead).

 

It wasn’t long after receiving that calculator that I became a co-operative student with a General Motors plant.  It was part of my evolving plan to become an engineer.  My father and I talked about the future and my course of studies; he fretted over my choice of architecture.  Architects are a dime a dozen, they don’t earn much, and the topic won’t challenge you, he said; you have to pick something that will push you to grow for forty or more years of your working career.  Okay, what about engineering, isn’t there something close to architecture?  Sure, structural engineering, Dad said.  With that I turned down the wrong road, ending up a miserable student at GM and even more miserable in engineering classes.

 

Yet there were invaluable lessons in the two years I choked out being an engineering student in senior year of high school and freshman year at college.  I became a damned good draftsman, learned to use punch cards and databases to manage drawings; as a junior draftsman, I learned about coding and taxonomy for document management.  Microfiche and blueprints and silver line prints were my friends; I can still smell the oddly bittersweet mixture of ammonia from blueprinting and developer from the silver lines all these years later. 

 

Reprieve from GM came in the form of a layoff; we were entering an economic trough and only students with 3.5 average or better would keep their jobs.  Being a solid 3.0 meant I would be liberated in the middle of crushing unemployment.  Utter joy.  I worked several awful retail jobs, suffering through the onslaught of Christmas seasons and commission sales, only to end up without a job again and an uncertain return to my career plan.  I’d had to quit school as I simply couldn’t afford it.

 

I took a job as a draftsman with a structural engineering firm; my work included helping the engineers with data entry for finite element analysis of structures.  We’d gotten one of those new-fangled personal computers, an HP 9845 with dual tape drives; I’d enter in the data and the engineers would dial up a mainframe computer at another site to upload the data for analysis.  But all fun things must come to an end; I was laid off again.

 

A freak opportunity came my way through a friend’s mother; she knew a business woman who needed a housekeeper, just someone to come in and pick up every day for a half-hour.  It paid a paltry sum, but it was cash in the amount equivalent to gas money for the week.  I swallowed my pride and took it, washing wine glasses and picking candle wax off the dining room table, making the bed and folding laundry.  It got me out of the house for a bit, I rationalized as I fought off feelings of self-pity.

 

My employer called me, told me I was doing a great job, but that she thought she had something more challenging to do.  She met me for lunch and interviewed me for a trading assistant’s position in the commodities brokerage house for which she worked.  Come the following Monday I found myself behind a desk, typing up orders and answering calls from traders overseas.  It was fun – not the mind-numbing paper shuffling part – but the number crunching, the thrill of helping take a position in a particular commodity at a profit, learning about foreign business and cultures at the same time.  There was room for improvement, though; couldn’t we do this faster, better, than using hand-ledgers for everything?  My boss sent me out to start shopping for a computer, about which none of us on staff knew anything.  What was this DOS stuff that we had to have, along with the computer?

 

I learned soon enough, but at two other firms.  I worked as a clerk/technician, writing specifications for public works projects on an IBM PC and kept financials and survey records in spreadsheets for an engineering consultancy; as a production control assistant for a signage firm, I kept track of materials, man-hours, and cash flow.  When the sign company folded, I took what I’d learned to a machining company, converting all their hand-written ledgers, manually-typed invoices and payroll to spreadsheets and then to accounting software, and started cost accounting (which heretofore had been entirely in the boss’s head).

 

It snowballed – I found myself at a Fortune 100 company doing logistics and customer service, writing queries for performance reports coaxed out of a MRP system run on a DEC VAX cluster, purchasing and integrating international invoicing software to run on the same.  An internal move to another role found me setting up databases for regulatory compliance and encouraging others to move to that squeaky new toy, the Internet.

 

It was insidious how it wormed its way into everything I did and touched.  I found myself answering so many questions about print queues and software glitches and websites that I realized I was becoming a geek.  Damn, can’t I make a living doing that?  I wondered…

 

As it turned out, I could.  I returned to plant where I’d once been in customer service to be the IT contact on site.  I loved my job, in spite of being on call 7x24 and having to be in truly odd places at highly unusual times (like on a scissor-lift twenty-feet above the plant floor, fiddling with network equipment late in the evening).  No day was ever the same – every day brought a new and fun challenge.  The plant was spun-off; I migrated to running an IT warehouse for the same corporation, surrounded by shelves and shelves of disk drives and servers and routers, provisioning every IT project around the globe.  Eventually I ended up on the other side of the provisions, managing global IT projects, working with lovely geeky people the world over.

 

Now?  I’m kind of between things, dabbling a little with writing about geeky stuff.  I suspect that whatever comes next will only build upon this relationship with technology that has slowly consumed and replaced my earlier career plans.  Had there been a clearer path to IT at the time I left high school, I might have ended up here far earlier.  Or not; the path I took helped me see how entirely critical technology is to the way we work, to our prosperity.  Had I not earned this respect I might have been more likely to be one of those terse geeks without feeling for a “stupid user”.  I’d even returned to school in business, through which I sailed in part because of my understanding of the intertwined nature of technology and business.

 

Go ahead, check it out, see whether you’re digital and a geek, too.  Or perhaps you already know for certain that you are.  How’d you get there?  Directly or through a convoluted and circuitous path like mine?

 

  1:23:17 PM    comment []