The New Boss

32

As more students trickled from the Business College to the associated accredited College, the flow of students on Saturdays to catch-up on classwork also dwindled. After the spring quarter of Nineteen Eighty-Six, the weekend office staff decided they weren't really needed any more and gave me the spare set of keys and showed me how to open the doors, turn off the alarm system and turn on the lights for Saturdays, and the opposite routine for the end of the day eight hours later. From June onward it was just me as the only paid presence at the school on Saturdays, I was even more my own boss.

When I had started as the Computer Monitor & Tutor I had a high of six students filter into the computer room during the day who needed to catch-up and would sometimes ask for help. The majority of my time, after performing morning backups, I would sit at the teacher's desk and use his control terminal to explore the TI-990 computer system until I had learned every corner I could, then see what types of things I could code with it. By this Spring, I had exhausted that line of interest and was back to either writing code into notebooks for when I'd get back home to my new IBM PC clone, or combing through printouts of recent PC code in search of logic bugs and chances for improvement. By this summer quarter, I'd be lucky if I had two students come in during the course of the day needing to use the computer, and rarely needing my help at all.

When there were other staff members on site, I would take a quick break to pickup some mid-day junk food but as the only one I now had to get everything on the way to the College to keep me busy for the next eight hours. When the only one there, I'd roam the single floor building and peek into classrooms I had once had classes in and remember a brief highlight or two. By the end of the summer quarter, I started to bring in my stories to proof read & edit in the computer room as there wasn't enough people around to notice it wasn't computer related.

Then one Saturday in August I opened the building and walked to the office in my thirty second time period to type in the alarm code to disarm it and... It didn't work. I tried again, no luck and the alarm went off. What do you do? I opened up the closet where the main alarm system was stored, and found a company contact number emblazoned on the box and called, letting them know of the problem and it being a false alarm. They said they'd send someone out to disable the alarm and, while it blared, I went to the computer room to get the morning backups started, then returned to the office to wait. I decided to call the Headmaster's phone number and let him know, but was only able to leave a message on his answering machine. His was the only number I had to call if there was a problem.

About a half hour later the alarm company rep showed up and asked me what had happened, I told him and he checked the system and couldn't figure out why the alarm code hadn't worked. As he opened-up the guts of the system two police officers arrived and wanted to know what was going on, I told them and they asked for my Employee Identification to prove that I worked here. The school had never issued one so we brainstormed how I could prove I had a right to be there. We came up with me showing them I had the keys that could lock the door and unlock it again as well as the classrooms. They felt that was good enough as the alarm company rep was there as well and finally got the alarm stopped after about an hour of it sounding continuously. The rep had it reset to its initial state and I needed to type in the code I wanted for it to be ready for rearming at the end of the day, I used the only code I had ever been told and once the rep left, I called the Headmaster's phone number again and left a message that the problem was resolved and the code reset. That was my only excitement of the day and was otherwise alone as no students showed up.

The following Monday I was called by the Headmaster to come back to the school after I finished with my grocery store hours. When I arrived he explained to me that he had decided to change the alarm code the previous Friday evening and had forgotten that I needed to know it. He had once again reset the code and he told me what it now was... And he then disappeared a few of days later. After the first days passed, the office staff called the out-of-state owner of the Business College about it and they sent someone to temporarily head the place. From that out of state office, they were able to provide the home address of the Headmaster and some of the office staff went there to find no answer at the door. Only when the temporary guy arrived were the police contacted and a 'wellness check' performed, with the police breaking down the door of the Headmaster's house to find that he had been on a full drunk bender for the week and the out-of-state owner decided to permanently replace him by September.

My Saturdays were back to being what they were. By this point the Business College had discontinued daytime computer classes after discontinuing the nighttime ones the year prior. Now the only use for the TI-990 was for the 'Computerized Accounting' courses still held and given that I'd coded-up a great new interface for that the previous winter, there was no need for those students to come in on Saturdays and catch-up. I started to bring in my Dungeons & Dragons books and formulate my next games for the Friday evening group. I had continued to try and recapture the great D&D feeling from my final high school year once I had moved to Colorado and my most recent attempt was a Friday evening group, the one evening I didn't have classes to be at. I had rounded-up about four people to play, but it was limping along and soon one of the four left...

Even though there were no students coming into the school to use the computer, some still arrived to drop-off necessary paperwork at the office or to pick up blank forms. But this just made for brief greetings as they were soon gone, if I heard them at all while in the computer room. I was called in by the new Headmistress of the school the Monday after one Fall weekend and when I arrived I was chewed-out because a keyboard in one of the rooms at the far end of the building had been broken. At my blank expression the Headmistress explained that it must have happened during Saturday as those using the room hadn't noticed it broken before the weekend and what did I know about it? Nothing. She felt I should be held responsible for it but I pointed out that, while I did roam the building a couple of times during my Saturdays, that my assigned place was the computer room and my job to monitor it, not the other rooms. As the broken keyboard was at the other end of the building I didn't see what I could have done about it. This lead to some grumpy considerations during the week and then I was told that I was to now check the halls first thing Saturday morning to make sure all the other doors were closed & locked. I agreed.

By the end of the fall quarter, they decided to skip having 'Computerized Accounting' for the coming winter quarter and I decided I wasn't really needed anymore. Over the course of the year, despite getting my headaches under control, I had continued to lose more weight and finally even my stamina was giving out; I could use another true day off just to rest-up for my night classes and effectively full-time grocery store job. I went to the Headmistress to let her know that I'd be leaving with the end of the year, that I'd spend my last weekend ensuring the system could run fine without me and recommended that they have one of the accredited college computer monitors come by from time to time to perform backups and be on call if other problems arose. But if needed, I'd always be happy to come in if a problem came up and they couldn't get someone else.

She accepted this and, frankly, I doubt she had seen much reason for having the campus open on the weekends at all once she had taken over. After my last weekend, I turned in my keys the following Monday and took one last walk through the building, partially filled with its daytime students, and reflected on my having started here as a student three years earlier, and this being my first regular job in Colorado since I had moved here. Where once I thought I had no chance of a post high school degree, this College had told me otherwise and provided me a glimpse of my future.

I left, never to hear from them again and never returning on my own.

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The End

25

It was the final months of Nineteen Eighty-Five. With the threat of their store being unionized, the owners of the big grocery store, the Svensons, decided to take all the money they could out of the store on the week of the organizing vote, right down to getting their last truck loads of groceries on credit from the suppliers, so they could divvy-up the largest possible amount of money between themselves. Once the Union was voted in, they'd have a big surprise for us employees by promptly declaring the store out of business and walking us all out and locking the doors behind us. The only problem was, the Svensons had been such great people to work for that when the vote was called, they won and the store wasn't unionized... Now they were the ones surprised and all they had to do was take most of the money out of their pockets and put it back into the store.

Yeah, right.

They just couldn't bring themselves to do it. But at the same time they had no excuse to walk away from the store as they had won the vote and the store had been very profitable during its first year. So their new plan was to continue running the store on credit until its natural profit flow continued long enough to replenish the store's operating cash. Meanwhile the unionized established chain grocery store opened-up across the street and our curious customers gave them a look. As a result our natural profit flow was tapered down for the initial few weeks. The Svensons' first step to temporarily boost the profits was to cut everyone about five hours per week and just have the family members work additional unpaid hours to make up the slack. The nephew who worked in our department wasn't interested in that and left us. I don't know if he had another job lined-up in town or if he moved back to their home state of Minnesota to find new prospects among extended family and childhood friends. We were down to our department head, Butch, and the four of us employees. Three of us had been original hires who had started at the store in the beginning, with the fourth one being our new springtime hire who had turned out to be a pretty dependable guy. With the loss of the nephew, our hours weren't reduced any further as the next round of hour cutting came reducing the previous forty hour full-time employees down to thirty hours.

Things were winding down for me at the Business College as well, though in a different way. After two years of being just under a full-time night student, I had exhausted the courses I could take that would be transferable to the associated, accredited College. While I could finish a handful more classes at the business school and get my 'certificate of completion', transferring to the accredited College was a no-brainer where one could get an actual degree, then pursue a job in your chosen field. As a no-brainer, more and more of the Business College students had transferred over the past year and the once packed and thriving 'American Business College' was now about half full. It was deemed that there was no longer any need to have both a nighttime and daytime computer instructor and so the original nighttime instructor had disappeared by the end of the spring quarter. The original daytime computer instructor decided to leave at the end of the summer quarter and for the fall quarter I discovered that I had the new daytime computer teacher reporting to me as the most senior remaining person, yet they made me his 'Teaching Assistant' as they needed me to partially teach my final quarter at the school before transferring to the big brother...

It turned out there were two other nighttime students and me needing one last computer class. The daytime computer teacher couldn't work nights and the school couldn't insist we take days as we had all signed-up at the Business College under the agreement that we could get all our classes at night. So, since I was already an employee there as the Saturday computer room monitor & tutor, they asked if I could teach my own final computer course there. This meant that not only would I be paying for the class, I'd also get paid for it as well. To make this 'legitimate' I was just assisting the daytime teacher who would be officially teaching the course. He would roughly give me the details of what to teach and when to give pre-made tests, then I would review the material before hand and teach it to the other two students, giving them unlimited one on one attention as they did their coding projects as part of the class. This extra income helped to supplement my reduced hours at the grocery store so I wasn't left hurting at all.

But my co-workers at the store were feeling the pain and soon things got worse. Our suppliers were no longer willing to deliver us stock on credit and they let us know by just not having the trucks show up one early morning. I don't know if the Svenson family had been forewarned and just didn't believe it, but we employees showed up at the store at our assigned times in the early morning and waited and waited. We polished up the shelves as much as we could, but there reaches the point that they can't look any more full without the boxes and cans to fill them. We all ended-up in the break room chatting amongst ourselves and tossing things around for fun for the next four hours. Eventually the Svensons came in and got it confirmed from the suppliers that if they didn't start paying their back bills, they would not be getting any more stock. This would have been a good time for them to 'invest' their windfall money they got just before the union vote back into the store so all the bills could be paid off. But they still wanted to stay the course and let the profit flow catch-up to the waiting bills.

We were sent home by the sixth hour as the family negotiated a deal with the suppliers where they would pay whatever daily profits they had toward new groceries for each truckload, the suppliers would use part of the money to pay off back bills, and then with the remaining money, look over our order lists and pick & chose which boxes of groceries would just use up the remaining money. This lead to us repeatedly receiving half the stock we needed every couple of days and soon the shelves of the store started to look sad and empty; where once the shoppers had briefly checked-out the new grocery store across the street, when they returned the customers found our store looking tattered & depleted and lacking many of the staples needed for their family's cabinets. The Svensons addressed this problem by cutting their employee hours even deeper and Butch saw no future at the store and left, leaving just us four employees to manage our department for ourselves. While we did this for a week, the Svensons didn't feel this would work in the long term. Not being able to hire a new department head and, with more of the extended family members abandoning the cause, they dubbed one of us four the new department head. Of the four of us there was the well spoken man with a year's experience, the classic rough & tumble blue collar guy with over five years experience working at various independent grocery stores, the stutterer with a decade's worth of grocery store experience, and the 'new guy' with six month's worth of experience. At least they didn't pick the 'new guy', and the blue collar guy and myself had to walk the well spoken man through the process of ordering stock and keeping the department's books. It was a pretty easy time to do it as there was little else going on at the mostly deserted store.

As the fall quarter came to an end at the Business College, my students were very happy with the class I taught as, once we had finished with each class's scheduled work, they would ask me to go back to previous quarters' computer class material and help them with the bits and pieces they had never quite mastered. With the fall quarter done, nighttime computer programming classes went the way of the Dodo bird leaving only the computerized accounting classes to use the TI-990 at night. While the daytime classes continued, halving the overall number of computer students also reduced the number of students I needed to help on Saturdays. With my free time, and a need to make up for lost hours at the grocery store, as the head of the computer department, I assigned myself the job of modernizing the college's 'Computerized Accounting' software.

What they had was originally written to work with card readers for input and output. This code had been quickly patched to use the keyboard and video monitor instead. This meant the accounting students would look at a blank screen and have to type in their data based on what column it would have been placed on the original punch card. As they typed in this data at the blank screen, they would then count the number of columns to skip with the space bar, then type in the next bit of data. Without any prompts or feedback, the students often got this data in the wrong columns as they'd discover once entering in all the data and having the accounting software crash due to having the wrong, or partial data in the fields. The students could only start entering in all the data from scratch and hoping to get it right on their second try... third try... fourth try... The accounting teacher had been very frustrated with this and when I told him of my new project he was thrilled as I asked him what sort of features he was looking for. As our big brother, accredited College worked on a three semester year, rather than quarters like the Business College did, once I finished the fall quarter I had just shy of two months free time during the evenings to work on the code. Once done, I had given the software a whole new interactive user interface with on screen prompts and the ability to list and scroll up & down one's data to insert or delete records, and make data changes as needed without having to reenter anything. The accounting teacher was so happy with the result that he sang my praises to the administration and no doubt defrayed any hard questions they might have asked about my dramatically increased paid hours.

With the money from the additional hours working at the school, and not needing to make a partial payment toward my next set of classes until the turn of the year, I was actually flush with cash as my grocery store coworkers had to subsist on one third of our original work hours for the Christmas season. It would have been worse, but the 'new guy' wasn't going to take any more of it and left the grocery store, just us original three employees for our department remained. By the end of the year, the suppliers took the Svenson family to court and this lead to the details, of where all the money had gone, leaking out. The courts forced the store into bankruptcy and the Svensons were all abruptly gone soon after New Years, to be replaced by court appointed management.

It only took the courts two months to have the store back to full working order and thriving.

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Competition

23

While we weren't the first grocery store at the south end of town, we were the largest and thus able to offer lower prices than the much smaller grocery store nearby, so our large Home Depot sized grocery store was making money hand over fist into the Summer of Nineteen Eighty-Five. Plans were being made for the owning Svenson family to build and open up a second location at the north end of town. While these stores were warehouse sized stores, we still had normal sized stock and shelves. Kind of the best of both worlds... Then the competition came.

Another start-up grocery store chain in the same style as ours was being built and opened up by the Summer, but it was two and a half miles away and when they opened we hardly noticed the impact. As we had been first, our store had established the customer draw to our area and our side store spaces had all been filled-up, including a hardware store, and a fast food chain had opened at the far end of our parking lot along with a 'SwiftCare' branch location. We were the place to be and that's how our next competitor saw it, too, eying the empty field directly across the street.

Our chilled section of the store, which included dairy and frozen foods, had started out with our department head, Butch, plus one of the Svenson family nephews from Minnesota, and then the six of us who had started the weekend before opening. The six of us were all part-timers, as our hours were under thirty a week, but soon one left within the first few weeks and two more were gone by Spring. Rather than replace all three, the rest of us had our hours expanded to fill the gap with only one new employee hired to help cover the hours. Typically, four of our group would be working when the truck loads of groceries arrived in the early hours of the morning so we could more quickly empty the boxes and clear the aisles by eight in the morning. The remaining two would cover afternoon and evening hours which mostly entailed keeping the milk shelves filled and any special or other fast selling item topped-off throughout the day. As our hours expanded, I again had to remind Butch of my nighttime classes and existing Saturday computer job at the Business College. He thought he'd express his displeasure of having to schedule around these by giving me fewer hours than the rest, but it was only less by about two or three hours which was easily made up for with my eight hour Saturday job.

By August, a major chain grocery store was being built across the street from us, it was expected to open in time for the holiday season and, unlike our store, it was also unionized. I don't know if it was a coincidence or the major chain grocery store encouraged it, but the grocery workers union suddenly decided to organize our store. They first had representatives discover each employee's home address and visited us at home to warm us up to the idea of forcing our employer to become a unionized store, by September the Svenson family caught onto this and began lobbying the employees against it. They placed their plans to complete a second location on hold and the friendly, collaborative atmosphere between the family and us employees soon soured.

Butch decided to pass-on his displeasure by insisting I work any and all hours and force me to quit College and my associated Saturday job. When I told him College was my first priority, he apparently didn't want to fire me, but would instead reschedule my hours to be tightly against my college hours. Having me work the afternoon shift until five thirty, then I'd have to go straight to classes in my work clothes at six.

His attempted coup de grâce was realizing I didn't have classes on Friday evenings so he scheduled me to work Friday evenings, then had me come back five hours later in the wee hours of Saturday morning to help with the weekend truckload until it was time for me to go to the school and work my eight hour Saturday shift. Still I refused to give up my computer monitoring & tutoring job and was only given fifteen minutes to leave from the grocery to get to the school. What made this stunt silly was that having me come in so early on Saturday morning meant I was there two hours before the truck arrived with the new stock. As I had topped-off the rest of the shelves from back stock during my Friday evening shift, there was nothing for me to be doing with my return to work five hours later and so I would buy myself a microwavable breakfast and spend the first hours in the breakroom waiting for the truck to arrive. Butch wasn't going to come in that early in the morning himself to make sure I was fussing with the shelves, he'd just checked my time-card three hours later when he got in to make sure I'd punched-in at the scheduled time. Once the truck load arrived, I'd pull out the pallets to the various cases and they'd be in place with me having started on the frozen foods when the other employees came in with Butch. Sure enough, with this scheduling stunt, I was exhausted by the time I got to the Business College for my Saturday hours, but taking a few NoDoz pills helped me muddle through the hours on those days.

By late September, the union had organized enough of the workforce to demand a unionizing vote at the store and the Svensons, as we found out later, pocketed all the cash they could get out of the store just before the vote. Their plan was to simply close the store and walk away once the Union won. For the first time since the opening weekend eleven months earlier, all of us employees were in the store at the same time. The ballot box was in the middle of an open space at the back half of the store aisles where it could be clearly seen by both the Svensons and the Union Representatives as the votes were cast. One by one, we were to walk up with plenty of space between us to write down our vote on a slip of paper and carefully slip it into the box with one hand so all could see multiple votes weren't being stuffed in. Once the voting was done, the box was opened and the votes counted.

The store wasn't going to be unionized and the Union Reps walked out of the store stunned. But no more stunned then the Svensons who had pockets full of the store's operating money and yet still had a store to operate. All they had to do was take that money out of their pockets and put it back into the store's safe and bank account.

... that's all they had to do.

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Hard Lesson

20

I hadn't been told why, but the nighttime computer teacher at the Business College was gone by the end of the Spring Quarter, Nineteen Eighty-Five. An early champion of mine, he had gotten me my one day per week computer room monitoring & tutoring job. His initial attempt was to have the existing weekend monitor let go a year earlier which, as it was the daytime computer teacher's protege, didn't go over well and I was instead deemed as first runner-up if the protege should leave at some point in the future. Four months later, he transferred to the accredited big brother College to our little Business College and after a few weeks of attending class at that campus while coming to the old campus for his one day, he decided to find something else to do during his Saturdays and I inherited my first regular job since moving to Colorado.

Still, as there was that rivalry between the nighttime and daytime computer teachers, I was viewed with a touch of suspicion by the daytime teacher who also lead the computer department. While I did all of my Saturday tasks well, such as performing the weekly backups of the system onto various removable harddisk platters, helping computer students with their projects, and guiding accounting students through their one quarter of 'Computerized Accounting', when the daytime computer teacher had a problem, it wasn't me he called. Due to some mistake on his side, the daytime teacher had to restore the system disk from backups and, as he wasn't as familiar with the process, he called his protege for instructions on how to do it. After three failed attempts following what his protege had told him, he was becoming desperate and called me...

He had corrupted the system disk and for some reason the protege had told him that the TI-990's software was backwards for restoring from backup and the daytime teacher needed to specify the destination system drive as the 'source' and the backup harddisk platters as the 'destination'. Following these instructions, the daytime teacher had gone through all three official backups of the system disk and none of them had restored the damaged data on the actual system disk. When I came in and he told me this, a retired military man who normally had a sharp confidence, he was shaken as he had gone through and 'somehow' ruined all the backups. He was thinking I'd have to go to the Pueblo, Colorado, branch and get a fresh system backup from a sister school there.

I gave him a pleasant surprise that there was yet another backup copy in the room; as his protege had NOT taught me how to backup the system on his final day working for the school, I had to figure it out for myself. To be extra safe, at that time, I used a spare set of disk platters from a cabinet for practice before using any of the official three backup disks. I checked the cabinet and this test backup was still where I had left it and I recommended we first try to restore from it before sorting out an emergency drive to Pueblo. He agreed but then when I went to specify the destination as the 'destination' and the practice backup disk as the 'source' he pointed out that I didn't know what I was doing and had to do it backwards like his protege had told him. While it was obvious to me that was how the three official backups had been ruined, I instead sold it as ''trying something different'' and ''let's see what happens.''

The daytime computer teacher left the room in a huff as the disk copying began, officially ''to get coffee'' he actually called the Pueblo branch to let them know I'd be on my way. When he returned, the copying process was done and system disk was now running fine. The daytime teacher was stunned as his old protege had assured him the source & destination prompts had been backwards. He concluded that his protege had intentionally mislead him, but as he no longer worked at the school, there was nothing that could be done about it. As the protege had not spent his last day bringing me up to speed on maintaining the system like he had been supposed to nine months earlier, I wouldn't be surprised if he had back stabbed the daytime teacher. But given the daytime teacher's ego, it also seemed to me that he could have been told something like restoring the system was the same as backing it up and to just 'reverse the process' and the daytime teacher over-thought it to mean the 'source' and 'destination' prompts on the computer were reversed. Either way, I had now proven myself in the eyes of the daytime teacher and he no longer saw me as the former nighttime teachers 'plant'.

A few weeks later, when the print-head of the TI-990 died, the daytime teacher found the school could get a replacement, rebuilt print-head from a company in Denver and I was tasked to make the trip. As the school didn't have any formal relationship with the company, it was a 'cashiers check only' transaction and the head master & secretary nervously gave me the check in an envelope and had me sign paperwork officially accepting ''the money'' and acknowledging what it was supposed to be used for. I successfully kept a straight face and they gave me the driving directions to Denver and told me I could file for 'mileage' compensation along with my hours at the end of the week. This was my first time driving to Denver alone and the place was actually at the west side of the city so it was unfamiliar territory to boot. Still, I succeeded in getting there, handing over the cashier's check, receiving the print-head & receipt and driving back. On the return trip, I had a sudden fear that perhaps the reason the business had wanted a cashier's check instead of billing for it was because the 'rebuilt' print-head wasn't in working condition and when the school found out: Who would they blame? But my fears were for naught as I plugged in the replacement print-head at the school and it worked just fine.

It was at this time that the daytime teacher told me he was leaving for a new job at the end of the summer quarter and, having seniority, I would now be ''the head of the computer department'' as they had never hired a replacement nighttime computer teacher. I took this as a bit of humor until the start of the fall quarter and, sure enough, the new daytime computer teacher was coming to me to coordinate his hours and lesson plans...!

Being in charge of myself at the Business College would be a huge help by the end of the year.

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In My Face

17

Entering Nineteen Eighty-Five mother realized that, as I was a student, she could add me to her medical coverage at her hospital job without having to pay extra for only one additional family member. After my health scare last year, she added me likely to ensure she wouldn't have to be stuck with the full bill in case something happened, but also to take credit for doing something for me while not putting herself out. Either way, it was nice to have health coverage. About a month after she told me this, she discovered her plan covered Speech Therapy for those who stuttered and she thought this was a great idea and I was astonished as well as I had thought that was only something I could have gotten during my school years, not as an adult. An appointment was made and I'd soon have my first meeting.

With business college classes, my Saturday computer room monitor job, and my thirty hour a week grocery store job, it had been a challenge to find a spot for the visits, but once found it was locked-in as a weekly appointment. The speech therapist was in the hospital building itself down a few twists and turns in the old wing. As chance would have it, I would come to know this building well over the next few years and visit it again from time to time during the rest of my life, seeing it change, seeing it grow. As I finally found the therapist's office, she confirmed it was me and we settled in her room which included a number of props, for want of a better word.

After the routine paperwork questions, her first question about my stuttering was if I stuttered when talking to pets or young children? It turned out there were typically two types of stutterers, nervous and habitual. Nervous stutters didn't stammer when talking to their pets and children because there was no reason to feel threatened by them. As I did stutter when talking to them, that likely made me a habitual stutter, where I stuttered as a result of the back of my mind thinking I should stutter and thus the subconscious made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. And as it did, that stammering experience reinforced that subconscious expectation of stuttering.

She explained that we all made mistakes when talking as children and often what happens with stutters is that someone makes fun of them or criticizes them for it. For those criticized, they get nervous and the stuttering becomes associated with times when one feels nervous. For those made fun of, the stuttering becomes something for the mind to watch-out for and thus the seed is planted. Was there someone in my life who made fun of my stuttering, a family member or friend?

POW! Moments from my life flashed before me and I knew who but I realized I couldn't give the answer. I just shook my head. Perhaps she believed my response, or perhaps she realized that I had thought of someone as she further added that one's stuttering would often be at its worst when around this person and it was often best if the relationship with this person was addressed as well. I just shrugged my shoulders.

She decided to just move on and ask me if I realized what I did when I stuttered? So I thought to explain to her the repetitive starting of some words, or hesitating on others. But that wasn't what she was asking for, ''What else do you do?'' I was stumped and this was when she had me sit in front of the mirror and look at myself as I spoke, rather than facing her. Did I see what she meant? No I hadn't and so she pointed out the foot stomps and fist clenching. Once she pointed those out, I knew exactly what she was talking about. ''And your face?'' I was once again clueless and she explained that was because I was closing my eyes at the times I'd stutter and thus didn't see that in the mirror, nor my other facial contortions as I spoke.

She explained that these weren't actually part of stuttering itself but a coping technique gone wrong. Did I remember a time when I was stuttering and I found stamping my foot seemed to help get the word out that one time? Once when I was trying to say something, did I close my eyes to concentrate on getting it out and it worked? What would often happened to stutterers, she explained, was that these one time 'helpers' became a lifetime of engrained ticks that occurred during the stammering and as it seemed to help once, the mind repeated these along with the stuttering in an attempt to ward off future problems. But instead these became additional problems as they, ultimately, didn't make the stuttering go away.

Our time was up for our first appointment and I left for my car in the parking garage and ended up just sitting there for a while as, after two decades of stuttering, I felt this past hour had given me a lifetime's worth of insight and information to dwell on and consider. And I reflected on the past.

My mother often told me the story of how she met my father. She was a phone operator back in the days when all calls were made by talking to the operator and she, thus, connecting the wires to get you to the person you wanted. There was this one guy who'd call her desk and had the hardest time saying who it was he wanted to connect with and she would patiently tease it out of him and soon he'd make sure to place his calls, when he could, when she was at the switch board. This lead to him discovering her hours and eventually resulted in a date... Then two. Eventually they married. My mother patted herself on the back for having cured my father of his stuttering and his subsequent advancement into the management role at the ski area.

I remembered the times when I'd arrive on the plane to Colorado after having spent the school year with my father. I'd get off the plane and stuttered-up a storm for the next few days. My mother demanded to know what my father had done to me during my school year to have made my stuttering so much worse. But in reality I had stuttered less while with him and had only gotten worse when I had gotten off the plane. I remembered the couple of kids during High School that would make fun of my stuttering, but they would often do so by fake stuttering on my first name. As I never stuttered on it myself, I always found their mocking of me a sad reflection on them as they couldn't even notice what words I actually stuttered on in order to make fun of me. None of my elementary school friends or siblings ever made fun of my stuttering, at least not to my face. There was the one kid who asked about it once, but never made fun of it.

My mother was incensed and talked angrily of her son-in-law who would only ever talk to his daughter in cutesy baby talk during her preschool years, to the point that was how she grew-up talking and had to have additional help in her early school years to learn how to talk clearly, in an understandable way. But a lesson I learned early in life: We often complain most about the people who do the things we don't want to admit about ourselves. When the therapist asked me if there was anyone who had made fun of my stuttering during my life, the answer was yes, My Mother. She was the only person from my pre-high school years who made fun of my stuttering and mocked me about it when no one else was around.

And she was the coworker at the hospital whose insurance coverage was now enabling me to go to speech therapy for the first time in my life. While I doubted the therapist knew my mother personally, I didn't want to jinx my future appointments with her by saying it was another person who worked at the hospital.

As it turned out, it didn't matter. When I arrived for my second appointment, the therapist had to explain to me that she would no longer be able to see me as the insurance coverage was for people who began stuttering as the result of a recent health occurrence, such as a stroke, not for those who already stuttered as it was deemed a preexisting health condition. As the insurance was through the hospital, they had decided to wave the full cost of my initial appointment and a partial visit for today as they hadn't let me know in advance, but any further visits would have to be at full price, out of pocket. Well over a hundred dollars per visit, it was out of my budget and not something my mother would pay for either.

So to give me the best advice she could in lieu of having speech therapy, she told me to be aware of the additional ticks I had gained along with the stuttering and to learn to stop doing them and if there were people in my life who reinforced my stuttering by making fun of it, I should avoid seeing them. And when it came to the stuttering itself, it was a learned habit and I needed to unlearn it. The best first step was to pause when I thought I was going to stutter and wait until I could speak clearly, rather than experience the stutter itself and thus reinforce the habit.

With this rushed last bit of advice, I left the hospital and got into the car and drove back to my mother's mobile home where I would live for the next few years of my life...

With the only person who made fun of my stuttering, at least to my face.

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Every Time I Think I'm Out...

16

So I had a great interview for a job I didn't care about getting, a grocery store job. I'd been there and done that, but apparently my not caring and not 'dressing up' for the job interview made all the difference and four months later they called to let me know I was hired. Add to this that I had just gotten a job, at least tangentially associated with my chosen field of computer programming, as a computer room monitor and tutor at my local Business College... But that job was only one day a week and rather than turn down the new job, I decided to accept on the phone and then let them know when I arrived in person that I needed room in my schedule for my other job and evening classes.

If the first grocery store I had ever been to in Colorado had been half again the size of the only two grocery stores I had worked at, combined. Then this new ''warehouse sized'' grocery store was twice the size of that, including height, not just floor space. Think of a modern day Lowes or Home Depot store in size except with aisles of groceries instead of tools and supplies, in a green with white color scheme. This was near a decade before either of those two hardware stores had even thought about opening a branch in Colorado. When interviewing for the job at a small new building next door, I knew this grocery store was to be built in the empty field next to it, but I had never thought it would be built using the whole frigging field!

Awe struck as I saw this new huge building for the first time at the far south end of town, I pulled up to the front of it and entered through one of its two large archway like doors. I drifted around a bit before I discovered and walked-up to the customer service desk. As the store was not yet open, the hired employees were assigned to drift into the building in groups on the hour and my group was going to be the dairy/frozen food crew. Six of us were sent to wander over to the department head, 'Butch' and discover our jobs.

The 'Svenson' family were originally from Minnesota and had moved into town and taken over the lagging grocery store, oddly enough, right next door to my old Radio Shack that I had gone to in my first years in Colorado. In the three years in between they had turned it around and had now won a franchise license of a new grocery store chain. If all went well, they'd earn the chance to get another license for a second store at the far North end of town. While the seven male members of the family had been the right size to personally handle the smaller store, for this giant store, they'd split-up into two shifts, three for the morning and three for the evening with the patriarch father now taking a presiding role for the company, drifting in and out as he felt. Thus a series of department heads had been hired as the direct reports to the family members and then each department head assigned the pile of employees it was deemed they'd need.

When I walked up to Butch with the others and we introduced ourselves, I let him know right off the bat that I'd need Saturdays and evenings free for school. I could tell right at that moment that if he'd been in charge, he would have passed on me working there and picked someone else. But as the Svenson family had done the interviewing and hiring, Butch probably assumed they had hired me knowing my work hour restrictions and thus said he'd work it out. This first day was to meet & greet the department heads and be told the basics of working at the store and tentatively sketch-out our weekly schedules. Once all that was settled, we were told to come in this first weekend to work both days filling all the shelves and the store would open on Monday. I reminded Butch I'd need the Saturday off and was thus grudgingly told to come in on Sunday.

When I arrived Sunday morning a bit more than half of all the shelves and cold cases were filled and I realized they must have had semi after semi pulling-up to the loading docks all day Saturday just to get in all the initial stock. For this day, we were to breakdown the remaining pallets of stock which had been put into the dairy cooler and freezer room and finish filling the shelves. Six hours later we were done and handed our official schedules for the coming week. I was scheduled for the afternoon into the evening and once again had to remind Butch of my night classes. He grumbled, then decided he'd work the evening hours of my schedule and tweak things by the following week.

Being the only significant grocery store on this edge of town, it was a huge success in its first week and that success rolled through the first few months and the holidays. The six of us, all with around thirty hours each week, would work whatever was needed for either the dairy or frozen cases. No assigned places, just go fill what you noticed was low. By the turn of the year, one of our number was already gone. I never knew why, but he missed out on the bonus payments in our end of year paychecks, between fifteen and twenty-five dollars apiece, mine was eighteen dollars as I remembered.

Also, by the end of the year, I'd even lost a few pounds, too. Never a bad thing!

While there was a chance for advancement at the store, with my stuttering and not wanting to make this my career, I kept to my place as the others who started with me that first day gradually formed up into a hierarchy and with the new year the store would reach both its peak and have its crash...

And I would play my cards just right.

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My Big Chance!

15

Though I was only averaging about four days of temp work each month, it was enough to keep me from depleting my remaining savings too quickly and I was relieved when we found out I could get an account at the hospital's Credit Union. The original bank my mother had put my money in had started to eat up my remaining cash through 'maintenance fees' when it dipped below a thousand dollars. But by transferring it to the Credit Union, I didn't have to worry about it and was able to subsidize my employment gaps by nibbling away at my remaining saving.

The software start-up company was gone. Apparently the firm that was going to market and distribute their work didn't pan-out. Thus the previous year's educational software package was never sold to schools and my game was equally doomed. Without my help, the military guy they had borrowed was not enough to get the prescription tracking software suite completed in time for their first dead line and the military contract dried up. Al was soon working at the local newspaper as the computer operator for their systems. As my dreams had been dashed by the start-up company, now his were as well, at least for the time being.

As for me, I was still trying to make do with the occasional temp job I would get while still attending night school classes. Given my lack of steady employment, I was still qualifying for grants and student loans to cover all of my business college expenses, so that wasn't an issue. And the night computer teacher was still a huge fan of mine and was keeping his eyes open for a computer job for me. Until then, it was a few more construction jobs.

I got a three day construction clean-up job at an apartment complex being built just outside of town. While this construction crew didn't have the temps do work outside of clean-up, they did have the newfangled air nailers as they put shingles on the roofs and used the temps on the ground as nailer target practice. I quickly realized that the way not to be target practice was to stay out of sight under the eves as I carried my bits of debris to the dumpsters. I finished these three days without any nails in my back. My final construction clean-up job before the season wound down was at another apartment complex where they were installing the drywall onto the framed walls. The crew laughed and showed how they were walling up eggs in the frame behind the drywall as they were pissed at their foreman; once the apartment complex was finished the eggs would eventually spoil and crack and leave them with a perpetual rotten smell. They had a good laugh about that and I was once again relieved when my two days were up and I didn't have to worry about being involved in that little scheme.

Then there was September with no temp job and I saw my remaining savings reach the double digits and I hadn't a clue what else I could do as I could never make it beyond the interviewing stage at computer job interviews. Then I got the phone call I had been waiting for from the temp agency: Would I like to work for the Big Computer Company in town? Yes, absolutely!

Oddly, though, I was to report at night but as it was the first time I'd gotten any chance to work there I wasn't going to turn it down and instead skipped that night of classes. I arrived at the main complex and reached the guarded front doors. I was ushered in and given a temporary badge and I was there... To empty trash cans and vacuum the floors. NOT QUITE WHAT I HAD ENVISIONED. Still, it gave me a chance to roam the whole building and finally see it after years of hearing about the place. One wing was multi-floored levels of work cubicles, another wing was a construction floor where night workers were assembling minicomputers for some expectant businesses elsewhere in the country. In between the two wings was the expansive cafeteria. Once the night was done, there wasn't going to be another night as they only needed me for the one. After this, I told the temp agency I wasn't interest in any more jobs unless they were computer related; they assured me they already 'knew' I couldn't do a computer related job and none would be forth coming.

And that was the end of my time as a temp.

The very next week, the Saturday computer monitor at the Business College gave them his two week notice and I was immediately tapped to be his replacement. I was relieved that I would no longer have to worry about running out of money and not being able to buy food or gas for myself. Or so I thought as I reached my first day as computer monitor with my last few dollars in my pocket. The original guy overlapped with me on this day and I was supposed to learn from him everything I needed to know to run the TI-990 minicomputer and keep it backed-up. He showed me how to boot it up in the morning and where the backup disks were kept and he went out to get a cup of coffee at the local 7-Eleven... And never returned.

I think this was intended to be revenge for the nighttime computer teacher wanting me to take his job even though I hadn't asked to, thus he left me as the new computer monitor without any significant training with the expectation that I would soon fail and make a fool of myself as I hadn't a clue. But being computer savvy, I figured it all out on my own by the end of the day and soon earned some respect from the doubting daytime computer teacher.

Then I discovered I wouldn't get my first paycheck until the end of the biweekly pay period in two weeks. I knew, given my current lifestyle of averaging about five dollars on food each day and maybe one dollar on gas, what little money I had wouldn't make it until then. Given my five year long friendship with Jeff, and knowing I'd have the paycheck in two weeks to pay him back, I asked if I could borrow twenty dollars to get me through till the following week. He explained to me that he never lent money out to friends.

I was stunned. But I realized that I had asked and thus I should have been willing to accept the answer, whatever it was, without complaint. This was a lesson that I took to heart for all the future times I asked something of someone, ensuring that I did so without any expectation of the answer I wanted to hear. I made due for that final week by eating every other day and thus used the last gallon of gas in my car to pick up that first paycheck and cash it at the bank.

The next day the long forgotten grocery store people called up and offered me a job.

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Back To School

8

After rupturing my left eardrum from a case of walking pneumonia, a specialist appointment had been scheduled for me by the emergency room staff. Given the Monday doctor's appointment I ended up taking the night off from classes as well to have that extra day to heal up before returning to school. The specialist's advice was the same as the 'SwiftCare' doctor of using a Vaseline slathered cotton swab to keep my left ear canal dry when taking showers with the addition of returning in a few weeks for a follow-up. Though functionally deaf in my left ear, I returned to the Business College after almost missing a full week and checked in at the office to let them know I was back.

Business College was a blessing compared to High School in that they accepted computer typed in and printed up homework and reports. During my spare time between arriving at Colorado and before I entered Business College in the Fall, I had felt inspired to get back into writing Science Fiction for fun and became very familiar with the TRS 80's text editor as a result. Now I was using that skill to write up my college work. Where before I would keep my written work to its barest minimum to avoid the pain in my hands from hand written work, now I gushed all I wanted into the keyboard without any limits. I soon had to learn the new skill of editing to cut back my work to ensure it had focus, but with the excitement of this new flow, I didn't mind. Neither did the instructors at the College who would get a variety of hand written work of all types from everyone else, then get nice crisp and clean print-outs from me.

As with High School, when it came to picking up and mastering the subject matter for tests, there was no problem. Remembering my final high school experience of 'testing out of a class for credit' I asked the Business College if they had something like that as well for some of the more basic courses needed to gain my certificate, such as basic English and Math classes. They did, but the catch was it would be the same price as taking the full class and what I'd have to do is take the Final. If I wanted, I could buy the associated book and go through it on my own before taking the test, or I could just take it cold. As a result, rather than taking four classes per quarter, I would select three courses to take in person and one course to test out of, thus I seemed to get four courses for the time commitment of three. I thought it was a fair enough deal and I received the grade for the tested out course based on the grade of the completed Final.

There were two computer instructors for the College, one who handled the daytime classes and the one who handled the nighttime classes. The night teacher was soon impressed with my computer programming skills and the way I'd pick up a new computer language in the first week, then spend my class time helping my classmates as they were coming up to speed on the language syntax and logical structures, themselves. By Summer, the night teacher told me he was going to recommend I have the job as the Saturday computer lab monitor. They already had one, but the night teacher found that while he was technically capable of keeping the computer running on the weekend, he really didn't have any interest or patience when it came to helping out the students who would come in for extra time. I was neutral to the idea, but willing to do it if offered to me.

What I didn't realize was I was being used in a little power play where the night teacher wanted his guy monitoring the lab and thus prove his dominance over the day teacher by having his guy kicked out of the job. This resulted in my being called to the office as the two were arguing it out with the current lab monitor watching from the side. When I came in, the daytime teacher decided the fastest way to put the kibosh on me in the eyes of the headmaster was to ask me obscure technical questions about the TI 990 minicomputer which, of course, I didn't know all the answers to. But I was honest about that fact as I had only been using the school's computer for the past few months learning languages, not the technical details of the hardware or system software. While my lack of knowledge of the ins and outs of the TI 990 put an end to the tug of war as to whose guy would be in charge of the computer lab, the headmaster was very impressed by my composure and honesty and said he'd keep me in mind if other opportunities came to light. While the night teacher didn't get his way on the matter, he also seemed happy with the outcome as he had proven himself not to just be the daytime computer teacher's nighttime lackey.

By this Summer of Nineteen Eighty-Four there was 'good news' throughout the campus. The private company that had created the 'American Business College', and had many other versions of it sprinkled across the country, had bought an ailing, though nationally accredited, College. This meant they could now create branches of that College through the country which would all be accredited themselves and thus we students could transfer to the new College at some point and transfer with us our credits from the Business College. Now, I was told, instead of a certificate of completion, I would actually be able to get a degree for my time and money! At the time I was a little oblivious to all this stuff, but in retrospect I had lucked-out big time... I continued at the little Business College for another year and a half before I transferred to the new accredited, branch College in town.

As for my eardrum, I returned to the specialist's office a few weeks later as requested. He looked into my ear and then used what were like long tweezers to reach into my ear canal and peel away the dead tissue clogging it. It had all the fun of pulling scabs off of one's body, except it was all happening on the inside of one's ear. I fought to keep sitting quietly & still as he reached in again and again peeling out more dead tissue. Then he was done and I discovered I could hear again on the left side. He told me I wouldn't need to use the cotton swab and Vaseline trick any more and I was thrilled on both counts!

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