Nope, I didn’t almost forget today. I read my daily dose o’ news @ Salon while eating my fajita burger from the cafeteria, and here I am, right on time.
Wow, this is really uncomfortable. There was about 5 minutes there between “right on time” and “Wow”. What do I tell you? What can I say that won’t come back and bite me in the butt? Not much, I’ve come to learn. So, let’s do a little history, shall we?
I’ve been on the web since early 95, and have worked for the same company (the giant blue triangle) for almost my entire adult life. I started there in May of ’95, in tech support (which I may talk about at some point, along with some other weird stories from that time period if I get brave). Now, I write frontend/middleware code for one of the largest search engines on the planet. I wonder almost daily about how I got here, why I never went back to school, and what it was about the job that kept me there for so long, when I SHOULD have quit and gone back to school. Not that any of that really matters now. I’m 26, married, have one kid, two cars, a mortgage and am starting to go grey. So, what does thinking about any of this do for me? It’s kind of fun, really.
I loved my first year in tech support. I learned about modems, Win95, Mac System 7.5 (and its babies .1 .2 and .3), and all about how things get gummed up. I took calls from people all over the country, calling about things that had nothing to do with our software, calling about their kids’ saying bad words in chat rooms, and how they HAD to get their e-mail, but couldn’t because their account had been cancelled.
I also met some amazing people (and got in lots of trouble for a good little Mormon boy). Some of them are my best friends, even though we’re 3k miles apart. They helped me grow up and realize that my parents weren’t always right, and that my politics were WAY over in Rush-territory and needed a correction (not through preaching, just because I got to observe people that weren’t like me). I’m rambling now, but it was a real system shock to meet my first lesbian, openly gay man, and wow, lots of other people I’d never met before (transgen guy, my first bisexual couple – they were funny, etc, etc ,etc). The list goes on, and I figured out they’re not the evil people I was brought up to think they were (not through preaching, just by example). I miss that. Here at the “Corporate Headquarters”, everyone’s so apparently normal. I don’t see the variety I did in tech support, and it’s kind of boring.
Tomorrow… Early life online, or How E-Mail Almost Got Me Fired.