Installation
by Mark—Age 50—Media, PA
I’ve been at the same computer company for 29 years. That’s unheard of these days. Now I’m a desk jockey in customer support, and I spend my day answering technical questions and looking over my shoulder. Satisfaction comes with mundane things like someone promptly responding to an e-mail. My hands are soft. I don’t produce much that’s tangible. But back in the eighties, I had the job I still daydream about ““ being a technician on the factory installation team. I can’t believe they paid us for that.
The boss assigned two guys for each job, installing large scale computer systems at customer sites. About fifteen of us traveled, all in our twenties and good buddies. The destination could be Johannesburg as easily as Detroit. For two weeks or so we’d work and party together. Much of that time is now a blur of strip clubs, airports and assorted close calls, with each job holding some special memory. That period was my rite of passage.
It was a gravy train. Forty hours of overtime a week was typical. At that time, we lived large on $32 per diem for meals. Eating cheap meant Red Lobster. But if you wanted extra drinking money, Wendy’s was acceptable. In Tokyo, get a receipt and the Kobe beef dinner was yours. It was all simple once we figured out how to work the system.
At the customer’s data center we’d unpack the new system, and in one day fill an empty computer room the size of a gymnasium with rows of one-ton cabinets and fridge-sized disk and tape drives. Then we’d spend days bolting it together and cabling it. If it powered on with no explosions, we’d run diagnostic tests and see how broke the thing was. That technology was fragile and didn’t travel well, so we’d spend more days debugging and fixing problems using mallets and soldering irons. Unlike today, where a processor sits on a tiny silicon wafer, and the inner workings are as mysterious as a woman’s’ brain, we knew how these things worked. We followed schematic diagrams chasing parity errors and dropped bits. Eventually, we’d end up with thousands of blinking LEDs and the operating system would answer our commands.
We brought dead things to life. And when we were done a job, we could look back and see that we did something.
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