uncle ken's big break

So there I was in Austin Texas, eating that good food, drinking Shiner Bock, sitting on my balcony in January seeing photos of people pushing cars through snow in the faraway midwest while I sipped my sweet iced tea, working as a temp for the Texas Attorney General.  Life was good.

But working as a temp wasn't all that good, I wanted a regular job with better pay and benefits. When one of the paper pushers in my department quit I thought that I should get his job so I went to some muckety muck and asked about it, and he asked me who my people were.  My people?  You mean my parents, my friends?  No, he meant, well he meant that they didn't want anybody nobody sent.  Well shit.

But somehow in this todo my resume came to the notice of Jim Parrish.  He was connected with the data processing division of the Attorney General, and for some reason my degree from the University of Illinois impressed him (the first time my college degree had ever meant anything,  Years later it would enable me to become a substitute teacher, the second and last time it ever did me any good), and he became my mentor.

He was kind of an eccentric guy, he was in the data processing department but he didn't know much about computers.  I kind of did odd jobs for him vaguely connected to computers.  I could tell that other people in the department weren't that crazy about him, and since I was his protege they weren't too crazy about me,

But he had some kind of clout because he was sort of in charge of the new project which was that all the attorney general's offices were getting pc's.  And not just pc's, pc's with hard drives.  Imagine that, a pc you didn't have to keep switching floppy drives in and out of it, this just fifty years after they started selling sliced bread.

Like I said Jim didn't know much about computers and there arose some point where they were putting things in slots of the pc's, and there was one way that made sense and another way that looked better. Jim preferred the better looking way and he stuck to his guns and he got canned.

For some reason they didn't can me too, but nobody wanted much to do with me since I had the stench of Jim Parrish all over me.  I came in every morning and nobody told me to do anything so I just studied Lotus 123 which was the first practical software for the pc.

That's all for now. If neither of the dogs distracts me with some other burning issue, they can expect to hear the next installment tomorrow morning.