work days

I’m pretty impressed with how far computer technology has come. I remember one morning just before Thanksgiving I got out of bed, booted up my computer and glanced at the news stories on line. One particular one caught my eye and I wrote a blog about it, while sitting my office, which was the third bedroom of my house, in a rural town, miles from nowhere. Within two hours, a gentleman from Great Britain commented to me that a couple of lines from my blog had been quoted in an on-line British publication, a fourth of the distance around the world from where I was. I think the most amazing thing is how fast we got here, while I‘m sure you are thinking, “Jimbo, how many times are you going to tell us that story? Your fifteen minutes are over. Get over it.”

I say, it’s my blogsite. I’ll tell it as many times as I wish, but I digress.

It wasn’t that many years ago that the company I worked for had only five personal computers in the entire organization, and my department didn’t have access to any of them. We all had CRTs on our desks, but the DOS based system we had only allowed us to look at screens of records and the system was not interactive. The records we could access were from the end of the previous day and anything that happened in the last twelve hours was not yet available. The company had a mainframe computer and it generated tons of computer reports. We would do our work off of 11 1/2” X 14 7/8” green bar and gray bar fanfold reports. Then we would take action depending on what we interpreted on the reports and secretaries would type letters and faxes for us and manually type orders to our supply chain.

I accepted a position in another area of the company-- what is generally referred to as a “sideways move”-- meaning that I got no extra money or prestige for changing positions and I kept all of the duties I had before and took on more work. But I had access to a personal computer. I wanted to be able to spend all day at the computer to get myself more computer literate. Since there were only five computers in the company, it was necessary for me to share the computer with several other people, but I quickly dominated it and the others that used it would come to me occasionally to use it for ten or fifteen minutes. The computer had no modem, so I had no internet access, but I had the ability to compose and send faxes on our network, so I had some communication ability.

I had a small office and the computer sat just outside my office, in a large community work area, on an L-shaped desk. Frequently at lunch, the people that worked in the community area would come over and play solitaire on the computer. Once, I deleted the games and got everyone mad at me and someone had them re-installed. I told everyone that we had more important things to do than play games at work, so every time someone used the computer, they initiated a game of solitaire and left it on the screen, making it appear as if it were mine, since, by then, the PC had been designated as Jimbo‘s computer. Prior to accepting the position that allowed me computer access, I used to work with a group of serious professionals and I was considered to be the office wit. Sometimes, during meetings, one of my co-workers would ask me to do my imitation of the wicked witch of the west. I would , of course, comply.

“I’ll get you, my pretty. And your little dog, too. He, he, he, he, he.”

When I moved to where the computer was, my co-workers were a wild bunch and I was considered to be too businesslike.

They were all young; all had tattoos, they drank late into the night and smoked cigars and they spoke with language that I hadn‘t heard around the office much-- only out in the manufacturing plant. They would come in on Monday mornings and brag of their sexual exploits over the weekend and hint that poor Jimbo might not be a stallion, sexually. Now, I know your first thought is, “Something is wrong, here. The Jimbo we all know and love would come over the desk like a Tasmanian devil at the mere suggestion that he would take a back seat to anyone. He would bust open a can of whup-ass like Popeye breaking out a can of spinach. And when the smoke had cleared he would be doing a ceremonial dance of victory over the defeated rabble of these young toughs.”

Well, the problem was that I was the only man in the office. The second part of the problem was that any of these young women probably could whip my ass. You remember that Joey Buttafuco thing on Celebrity boxing. Sure, he won, but no man is ever really going to win when he enters the ring with a woman. As a middle manager, the option of suggesting a demonstration of my prowess would not have been acceptable, so, I just had to sit and take the abuse. The up side, however was that it was a good way of keeping a running conversation with young chicks who talked dirty.

In the late 1990s, when the internet was coming of age, I volunteered to research a web-based supply chain management system for the company for whom I worked. By that time we had a DSL connection and we all had internet access. You are probably thinking, “Jimbo, you dummy. Didn’t it occur to you that by streamlining your supply chain using internet technology, you were in danger of eliminating your job and those of your co-workers?”

The answer was that many of us were working long hours anyway, so I figured that by making the process more automated that we would free up time so we could see first-hand was sunlight was really like. These were modern times and we were not living in conditions like the ones Upton Sinclair described in his book The Jungle.

Okay, you’re right. I was a dummy.

The bottom line was, however, that the internet was not yet ready for the company I was working for and the company I was working for was not yet ready to take advantage of internet technology. So the conclusion I reached was: not now; maybe later.

Fast forward to the last position I held, and we did almost everything on the computer. We communicated primarily by e-mail and most of our clerical work was done on the keyboard and input into the manufacturing software system. Every time I apply for a job, the technical requirements are strenuous and I think it will continue to be even more so in the future. The computer has made our lives better in that we can do things quicker and better and it has made our lives more complicated in that we are expected to do more, do it better and do it faster. It isn’t the simple life anymore. And, I predict, it will get less simple. A frightening view of things to come.

In Jimbo’s world, however, we take what comes and we try to roll with the punches.