My congratulations, respect, and thanks go out to this year’s winner of the Turing award: Frances E. Allen. She is the first woman to win this prestigious award, and it really is about effing time. Not just for her, but for women in technology everywhere. Some of the very finest technologists I know are women and don’t get the recognition they deserve. This particular one make my job and the jobs of programmers everywhere that much easier because we can be lazy and let the compiler do the work.
I’m keeping this short because I don’t want to detract your attention from the following links if you don’t know about Ms. Allen. She didn’t win this award because she’s a woman, she won it because she absolutely, positively, 100% deserved it. And she did 30 years ago, too.
IBM Women In Technology Hall of Fame
Wikipedia Entry
For most of my career, I have either worked for myself or for someone else but from a home office. When I got this job offer, I was afraid of moving into an office environment, becoming a day laborer at a cubicle farm, listening to the sounds of work surrounding me on all sides. Initially I thought this was going to be a step down for me, but it turns out that I lucked out again. Someone must be watching over me, because this sort of thing doesn’t just happen. I keep getting struck by lightning. The good kind. Not the 10-million-volt-at-10-million-amps-that-makes-people-die type.
Enter: Travis*. How do I always seem to get so lucky. I interviewed a couple of times, was told that office hours would be flexible and that I’d even be able to work from home because this is a “remote company**” by nature. I thought I may have been falling into a bait-and-switch situation, but it turns out this guy was on the level. I walked into a corporate situation that shares a great deal of the cultural idealism that a small business like LibraryThing does. I had to pinch myself when I showed up on my first day of work, signed all my paperwork, and found out that he (and the company) was for real.
Now I have a desk, co-workers, and a lot of new names to try and memorize quickly before I make an ass of myself. I also have the chatter and whispering going on around me that is just oh-so-annoying to me that I bought some headphones and have been following the UPS tracking waiting for the moment the status changes to “Delivered”. (as I was writing the last sentence, they arrived, and I went home to get them)
Oh, these are heavenly.
After years of working in silence or quiet music around me, this is not a welcome change and I’m not having an easy time adjusting. Once again, Travis to the rescue: when it drives me bonkers, I can just pick up and go somewhere else. Home, Borders, upstairs to the “Array” room, wherever it takes for me to be able to get my work done. Now, I’m not dissing my co-workers, they just do things differently from me and that’s just fine. Hooray for diversity!
I think the most difficult thing about this adjustment has to do with my dogs. They’re not used to me being gone for any length of time and have been acting out because they’re bored and their little brains switch back to ‘default’ mode. “Default” mode for golden retrievers is “naughty”. Last week they are an entire bottle of multivitamins between them and we had to rush them to the vet to have them checked out. I won’t go into the details, but let’s just say it was messy, and that they learned absolutely nothing from the situation. They even tried to “clean up” the mess themselves. To us that would be like licking a battery to see what it was like, and then keep doing it even though we know it’s unpleasant.
It’s difficult to illustrate how strange it is for me to be picking out clothing and wondering “did I wear that yesterday?” when it really doesn’t matter to me in the slightest. I just don’t want to look like some kind of dirtbag - yet. I think the long mostly-grey tied-back hair, the mass of computer crap on my desk, and the fact that I show up generally around noon or so probably drives that point home pretty well.
The fact is, I think this is very similar to what it must be like for former full-time parents. They leave the workforce for a long time, then when they return everything is strange and unusual. No matter how well we know how to do our jobs or how much we love doing whatever it is we do, it’s still odd to no longer be doing it on our own terms. This brings me back to be struck by lightning twice. Here I have a real chance to make a difference, let’s hope that my new co-workers let me do it as much as I want to. That will be the next entry, The Entry About Sisyphus.
*As a manager, he reminds me very much of myself in the same position, which makes me feel very good about what I’m doing.
**The vast majority of IC’s employees are nurses who provide over-the-phone triage services from the comforts of their own homes. The infrastructure is amazing.
First, to let you know where I’ve been: Taking time off. Sort of. I interviewed for a contract position with this awesome company down in Cambridge, MA, but never heard from them after I sent in my estimate. Then, I interviewed with some other places, weighed my options, and chose Intellicare right here, almost literally in my back yard, in South Portland. Thanks to everyone who offered me work, I really appreciate it, and look forward to keeping in touch!
As of the 16th of February, I have been in Maine for three years. I arrived with nothing more than a dog, some clothes, a Powerbook, and a few hundred borrowed dollars. I hadn’t met Marie yet, I had no place set up to live, no job lined up, just a dream and some big ideas. My friends put me up in their very small apartment for about 10 days while I took a temp job and found a roommate situation. I worked in a call center making outbound “recovery” calls for a company who sells snake oil. If you’re not familiar with “recovery”, it’s when you call back someone who had inquired about a product but did not purchase. You offer them a cheaper deal, etc. and pray that they’ll buy something. It’s horrible, but it put food on the table and I got by.
About two weeks into that, I got moved to their QA department. That only lasted about a week before someone from their IT department found out about me and pulled me into the fold. I was offered a nice position, a decent wage, and insurance. Unfortunately the company was about to become embroiled in a small scandal, and because the accountant had embezzled over a quarter-million dollars, my position was cut and I couldn’t return to my old position because they now knew I was overqualified. I ended up having to sell my Powerbook to make rent and pay for gas. Then my Jeep died, so I had no car and had to take the bus into town. Now I was down to only my clothes, a borrowed bed, and a dog.
It was at this time that I met Marie. Our relationship was beginning, and we got along famously, but it was difficult to not be able to take her anywhere or do anything. I was borrowing a friend’s car so I could take her for rides and a single-scoop ice cream someplace. We spent a lot of evenings out on the beach with Stewie, eating cheap meals, and enjoying each other’s company. Then Steve Briggs entered my life and hired me almost immediately to work at Wowpages. I sent in a resume on Monday, interviewed on Wednesday or Thursday, and was hired on Friday with a start date of the following Monday. I was so broke he loaned me $20 to buy food with. He even picked me up and gave me rides to work occasionally. Soon thereafter, I moved in with Marie, got my bills caught up, and things started to cruise. We were still counting change, but now it was so we could afford some luxuries like going out to dinner on a weeknight and that sort of thing.
Stuff quickly improved from there. That winter we went on vacation to Florida together, in the spring I got a car, and by summer, we had added Seamus to the family. With continued hard work, I quickly moved up to a better car (which I am still driving), and could even afford cable television. That was a big day in my life, the day I got HBO and the DVR. Also during this time my mother passed away after a long illness, and my grandparents passed away after long lives. My youngest brother got married, my middle brother moved to California to pursue his PhD, and my sister quit school after like 350 years in a row to become a school teacher instead of living her life in a laboratory.
Another year had passed, then I got laid off from Wowpages. I had some savings and did a lot of freelance work until LibraryThing came along. At this point, I was making more than enough money, so Marie and I bought a home. Her pet sitting business that she started after being laid off from her bookkeeping position was going strong, my job was great, money was plentiful, and things have only continued to improve. I then left LT, and the future is now an open book.
All of this (and more) has happened in only three years. Thanks to everyone who was there with me and helped me out.
