Computers, Computers

30

Even with having two jobs at the time, the entry price of an IBM PC was still beyond my grasp and I continued to use my TRS-80 for four and a half years since I'd bought it. I had reached the end as far as updating it as well; while there were other options such as buying a third party color display interface for it, it had never been adopted as a common place add-on and thus there was no software that used it beyond what the third party company had come up with. After his first year with his IBM PC, my friend Jeff liked it so much he decided to get himself a second one... Sort of.

His own TRS-80 had become relegated to a forgotten room to run his online site as he had otherwise lost interest in it, and when it came time for his second IBM PC-ish computer, he decided to give one of the 'clones' a try. One of the greatest expenses for an IBM PC was the ROM BIOS. The Read-Only Memory Basic Input/Output System was embedded code that a computer started with when turned on. I'll say it's kind of like the computer's DNA that gets the computer going from scratch and provides a minimum library of software routines it can call to read the keyboard, display a letter on the screen, initially access external storage devices such as a disk drive, etc. While many IBM PC work-alike computers had come up with their own ROM BIOS to be the core of their machines, they didn't match the IBM PC version closely enough and often software written for the PC wouldn't run on the work-alikes. A clone manufacturer could always buy the IBM PC ROM BIOS to put into their computer thus guaranteeing they'd be one hundred percent compatible, but the license fee IBM charged for that ensured the cost of the clone computers would be as high as their own prices for a PC, thus any clone computer couldn't compete.

The Phoenix Technologies company came up with a novel approach to address this problem. Have you heard the joke that if you get enough monkeys locked into a room with typewriters they will eventually type-up Hamlet by accident? Phoenix came up with the idea of finding a group of computer coders who had no experience with the IBM PC and told them to create a ROM BIOS for them. They then told them what point of memory each BIOS routine would have to be placed into and what that routine did, but left it up to the coders to determine how to make it fit and work in that bit of memory from scratch. With this technique, Phoenix had a ROM BIOS created that was a perfect work-alike of the IBM PC's ROM BIOS with a legally verifiable story that any coding similarity between their ROMs was a coincidence as the people who created theirs had, provably, never seen IBM's code. Thus perfect IBM PC clones could be cranked-out at a significantly lower price.

Jeff decided that he would test this out for himself and bought his second IBM PC as a Phoenix ROM based clone that we assembled from various chosen parts. While he could have mail ordered all of these parts himself, he had a friend who had already become versed in doing this and was rapidly turning this familiarity into a small business out of his home. Jeff took me on his trip there and picked out his case, motherboard, various interface cards and storage hardware and assembled them into a working machine while we were there. His friend then added up the cost for all the parts Jeff had chosen, added a little bit on top for himself, and Jeff went home with an IBM PC clone for effectively half the price of buying a new IBM PC, itself. Jeff plopped this computer on the same table right next to his IBM PC and then spent the next month and more trying all of his PC software on the clone side-by-side to find something that didn't work. I was often in the seat next to him as we did this and we couldn't find anything that tripped-up the clone... that we cared about. I think one exception was the IBM PC diagnostic software which noticed the clone's Phoenix Technologies ROM didn't perfectly match the IBM image and thus assumed it was corrupt. But as all other programs were fooled, who cared what the IBM diagnostic software thought of it?

After two months of hands-on experience with this clone at Jeff's house I realized, with the vastly lower price, I could finally enter the IBM PC world at home and soon made an appointment at the friend's house to assemble and buy my own clone. This time Jeff joined me and helped me select a handful of improved items, such as a flip-top case for my version of the clone, and I was on my way home and raring to go. My TRS-80 computer was packed away into its Radio Shack made luggage cases and stacked in a corner of my bedroom and my PC clone put in its place on top of my custom made computer desk. While the desk had holes for the TRS-80 components to slip into, the clone's case and keyboard were bigger and just sat over the spots where the holes were, hiding them nicely while not falling in. I was into the modern computer world once again... Which as I was starting to learn, meant I'd be outdated by the end of the decade. By the mid-nineteen nineties, people's computer purchases were outdated by the end of each year, and by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, people's computer purchases were outdated by the end of each month. Today, whatever you see on the shelf is already outdated and you just decide to accept it. Or you make the mistake of buying some cutting-edge technology through the mail and it's outdated as it arrives at your door step.

One thing I didn't have to worry about becoming outdated in Nineteen Eighty-Six was the computer at my new accredited College. They had a fully fledged version of the TI-990 minicomputer that my Business College had and these computers, products of the nineteen seventies, had long since been outdated: That's how the colleges had gotten them so cheaply. This new College equally had more computer languages to master that were also outdated as I'd come to learn and one of them was RPG II. Report Program Generator, mark 2, it was a language so limited that all you could really do with it was read existing data on a computer and chose a format to output it in, most often to a printer. The Final for the class was to, you guessed it, read a file of existing data and print it out in two different formats. The teacher told us we'd have to create two different programs for this as he wanted one format to be a full listing of the data, and the second format to be a summary. Being the annoying computer smart ass that I was, I realized I could do it in one RPG II program given my now year & a half of direct experience using and running the TI-990 system at the Business College. Still, as the teacher had told us we'd need to write two programs, I didn't want to turn in a single program for the Final and get dinged for only doing half the coding, even if it did everything the teacher had wanted. So at the end of the class, I went up to him and asked if I could go ahead and do it as one RPG program. He assured me I couldn't. I said, ''Yes, but if I could write a single RPG program that could do it, would that be allowed for my Final?'' He had enough experience with me to get that twinkle in his eye as he realized that, if anyone could pull that rabbit out of a hat, I could. Yes, he said he'd like to see that if I could figure out how to.

RPG II allowed you to take the same data and output it as two different files, so if the school had two printers, I could write one program that would print the data in different formats to two different printers at the same time, yet the school only had the one printer. But I had become familiar with how the TI-990 accessed its printer and there were two ways. The most common way was the 'spool', essentially a method where things intended for the printer were written to the harddrive and then printed-up the next time the printer was free. But I knew you could also address the printer directly, which caused your program to wait until the printer was free, then run and directly use the printer until it was done. My solution for the Final was to have one output file go directly to the printer while the other one went to the spool. Thus the program waited until the printer was free, printed the full data to the printer directly while spooling the summary. Once the full listing was done, the spool noticed the printer was free and popped-out the summary print-out immediately afterward. The teacher was very impressed and gave me top marks!

Unfortunately I wasn't able to capitalize on this with a future computer class or job opportunity with him as my days at the College were rapidly coming to an unexpected end...

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The Move

29

After living for less than a year at two apartments when she moved to Colorado, my mother finally found herself a mobile home to buy at a mobile home 'Community' at the far east side of town. While she was able to get that sense of ownership and permanency purchasing the mobile home, she was still stuck renting a slot for it to be parked in. Six years later, she felt the latest price rise in her lot rent was the last straw and she began searching for a new mobile home park to move it to. By the Nineteen Eighties, more and more new mobile homes were assembled on site and while still called 'Mobile Homes' they were actually stuck in place unless torn apart. Mother's was from the Nineteen Seventies and still had its trailer hitch on the front and tires in back, so she didn't suffer from such limitations. Despite there being many established and good looking parks closer to town, they all had the same level of lot rent and my mother wanted something cheaper. And she found it to the far south end of town in an empty field.

A new mobile home park was being set-up there and they had built the surrounding fence-wall and plowed and paved half of the planned roads. Utilities to the first third of the lots had been put in place, though land line phone service was tenuous and this was before the age of cell phones. Still, it was the right price for mother and she went to see it and asked me to come along. I hated it. It was built next to a partially filled suburb with one of its residential streets having been extended to be the park entrance. The intermittent north-south dirt road on the east side of town just barely reached it before running out and it was going to be the other entrance to the park, some day, once the park and the road were completed. Our current park had a nice club house, grown trees, and a 7-Eleven & Domino's Pizza within walking distance. This new location, at the time, didn't. Whereas the current park had roads wide enough for cars to park on the side while still having two lanes of traffic pass between with full sidewalks to either side, this new park had narrow paved ribbons between the lots which would barely allow two cars to pass each other, any cars parking on the side just left the road wide enough for one car to drive through at a time.

And there was no private phone line!

Given the amount of time I spent 'connected' online, having a shared phone line for several people in the park meant that I would not be able to dial-up and have fun until the wee hours past midnight, otherwise the phone line had to be kept free for the others who shared it in case they wanted to make or receive a phone call. The only saving grace for this new location was that it was close to my grocery store where I worked and closer, though not by much, to my computer monitoring & tutoring job. It was further away from my new College and the handful of friends I had.

Ultimately, it was mother's mobile home and thus her decision, and the price was right. The arrangements were made to tow the mobile home there. She found a company that specialized in towing mobile homes and had them scheduled to come on her midweek day off to move the home while I was at work. As it would be moved with everything in it, against the recommendation of the towing company, we had to take anything on a table top or hanging on a wall down so they wouldn't fall and break during the trip. As my TRS-80 computer was sunk into a specially built desk, I felt it wasn't going to go anywhere no matter how bumpy the ride was. I went to work at the grocery store that morning from the original mobile home park and once done, I arrived at the new lot location...

To find it empty.

As it was in the early afternoon I assumed the mobile home was in transit and debated if I should wait for it or drive toward the old location and watch it as it crawled along the streets. I opted to see it being towed along and drove to the original mobile home park. When I got to the neighborhood, in the empty field directly across the street from the 7-Eleven & Domino's Pizza shopping strip was the mobile home, left there, no tow truck in sight and my mother's car parked next to it. By the time I realized what it was, I had already passed it and had to wait to make a U-turn and go back to it. When I got there the trailer hitch at the front of the mobile home was all twisted, mother was inside crying. As access to the mobile home was through an elevated door on the side, which depended on external steps and those steps weren't in place, it took me a bit to figure out how to pull myself up to the door opening and into the home.

While mother had scheduled the tow truck to move the home, it never occurred to her to have it checked out before the move for 'road worthiness'. When they came to hook it up to the tow truck, they realized her home was still hooked up to all the utilities of the old park, and the two tires at the back had long since gone flat and need to be replaced. Mother had to scramble to find any company that she could hire to rush out and unhook everything and replace the tires. She hadn't planned on that expense but was relieved once that was finally done, and they could be on their way. With the tow truck hooked up to the trailer hitch, the mobile home was on its way and a quarter mile later, with years of rust and the weight of the fully loaded home, the hitch had given up and bent over, leaving the front of the mobile home dragging on the ground. As that wasn't safe to continue the move, the tow truck had struggled to get the mobile home off the road and to the empty field it was now in. Mother had to make arrangements to have another company come and replace the trailer hitch the following day and, if successful, the tow truck would return tomorrow afternoon and finish the move. Mother pointed out the bend in the first third of the mobile home where the weight of the trailer hitch end resting on the ground, without any support in between, had caused the home itself to sag in the middle and she feared it would be permanently curved like that.

While it had been recommended that she find herself a motel room for the night as there was no power or 'facilities', my mother was going to spend the night with the mobile home and guard its contents. Checking my own stuff had survived the attempted move, so far, I decided to just lie on my bed and rest for a while before collecting my books and going to my night class. Mother took the time to again cross the street and use the 7-Eleven's payphone to make arrangements to have the following day off from work, then returned to sit sullenly in the living room portion simply waiting in the darkness for the next day to come. Once I was at College, I used their phone to call my friend Jeff, tell him of the happenings and ask if I could sleep on his couch that night. He said I could and once class was done I returned to the mobile home and let my mother know. She had gained that empty stare into space and had no comment and so I left for the night, spent some time with Jeff before getting some sleep for a few hours then going straight to my next day's work.

At the grocery store, Bud came up to me once he saw me and debated if he should write me up for wearing the same clothes two days in a row. But once I told him the story of what happened he decided to forgive me and walked off, snickering.

Leaving work I skipped going to the new mobile home park and went straight back to the field across the street from the 7-Eleven, but the mobile home was gone. As it was nearest by, I checked the old lot first to make sure it hadn't been moved back there, but that lot was empty and I took a moment to notice the grassless rectangle of where the home had once been, bare between the trees and bushes that had grown-up around it since the mobile home had first been placed there a decade or so earlier. Then I drove along the route to the new mobile home park. Mother's home wasn't stranded along the way, or in another patch of unused field and when I arrived it was in its new lot. After spending all that money to have a new trailer hitch put onto the mobile home, there was no sign of it as the new park didn't allow them to be visible, so it had already been cut off once the move was finished. The bend in the mobile home was settling out now that the front had been leveled and concrete blocks placed between to take the weight.

There was another problem as all of the utilities couldn't be hooked-up as the necessary trenches hadn't been pre-dug in the lot, so I spent the afternoon digging those so the utility company could finish the following morning. Mother had to take a second personal day off from work as a result, but I got the trenches dug for her before I went off to my night class. Fortunately, there was still a weekday left before the weekend, so we wouldn't have to spend the weekend without full utilities. When I went to my class that night, I washed myself up in a lonely bathroom at the far end of the building as best I could and put on a fresh tee shirt I had brought with me before classes started, then I returned to the new mobile home lot for the night.

The following morning at work, Bud didn't come back to ask me about the rest of the move or why I hadn't taken a shower in two days, and once I got home all of the utilities were completed and I had a good long shower and satisfying nap during the afternoon. That evening, without classes to worry about, I helped mother put everything back in place on the table tops and walls that she hadn't gotten to yet and I took her out to dinner.

With all of the combined costs of the move, mother had spent three times as much money on the move than she would save in a year on the lower lot rent, and as it was all on charge cards, it would likely end up being four years worth of lost savings before it was all paid off. With a decade's worth of hindsight, mother had made the right decision as our old mobile home park was abandoned by most of its residents due to ever escalating lot rents. Without enough people to keep it in business, the park went bankrupt and fell into disrepair and became rampant with crime. Another decade later it was bought up and returned to its former glory. There were actually a few residents that had stuck it out in the decade between, guns always at the ready to protect their little lot like a wild west homestead.

That was not something mother would have been comfortable with.

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My New Owners

28

Once the bankruptcy court had sorted out the grocery store's finances and gotten it back into profitable working order, they were able to sell the store to pay-off the remaining debts. The new owner was an ''investor'' who lived up in Wyoming and wanted to get into the grocery store business. While he, himself, never came to the store, as far as we employees knew, he sent one of his trusted associates to come down to Colorado and handle the store on his behalf. I find his name wasn't memorable to me so I'll call him 'Bud'.

Bud's goal was to get the store into working order, which he was a bit late for as the interim court appointed management had done a good job at that already. But not so in the eyes of Bud and the first thing he did was make sure each person was assigned a specific set of shelves so he could hold them personally accountable for any issues he felt existed. He assigned these based on simplistic criteria. Whereas we would all chip in within our departments, and sometimes across our departments, to get our truckloads broken down and filled into the shelves, now a person was assigned to an aisle. You wanted to be the stocker assigned the paper aisle as your defined section given how large and light the stock was and fast to get on the shelves. You didn't want to be the stocker assigned the canned vegetable aisle given the small size of each item to be placed on the shelves and the need to rotate it. If you were, you were given the same time as the guy in the paper aisle to get your stock put up and if you didn't, you'd be written up. If the paper guy finished early and went to help you with the canned veggies, he'd be written up for working outside of his assigned area. On the other hand if the paper guy finished early and took an extended break until the end of his shift, well that was his reward for doing such a good job. Paying someone to sit around and kill time is a good thing, having the veggie aisle finished more quickly so the customers wouldn't trip over the remaining boxes when they came in during the morning, a bad thing. You do the math.

In the case of our frozen food & dairy department, the four of us were cut in half. The department head and I were assigned the diary stock and the other two the frozen food cases. Originally, two of us would come in for the truck load times to first put up the frozen food stock before it melted, then we'd get a start on the dairy stock. The department head would take the daytime hours and work on the remaining dairy stock until the fourth guy came in for the evening hours to finish off anything left. But now as we had to have one person cover the morning hours, we two truck load guys were assigned to come in hours after the truckload arrived, leaving the frozen stock to slowly melt on the floor until the frozen guy got in, the same was true for my dairy stock, but it wasn't as sensitive to warming up a bit before being placed in the chilled cases. As we started later, we'd leave at one in the afternoon when our section mate got in to cover the back half of the day. I have to admit I lucked-out and got the better part of the deal as I didn't have to keep my hands in the frozen cases one hundred percent of the time.

Gone too, was being a 'full-time' employee. Once working thirty hours or more was defined by employment laws to be 'full-time' and anything less as 'part-time'. The laws had changed leaving it up to each company to figure it out, with the proviso remaining that forty hours had to be called full-time and anything over was still legally deemed overtime for hourly workers. Full-time employees got profit sharing at the end of the year, part-time employees didn't, otherwise the benefits were the same and we retained our insurance coverages. Only our department head was chosen to be 'full-time' and the other three of us were deemed to be part-time. I don't know how the frozen food pair worked out their hours but for the first few months the dairy department head assigned both himself and me forty hours a week even though I was 'part-time'. After two months of this I jokingly asked the department head if this meant I was actually a 'full-time' employee. He decided to ask upper management about it, hoping to get me qualified for profit sharing. Instead, for all following weeks my schedule was changed to be thirty-nine hours and forty-five minutes so there would no longer be any question about it.

Once Bud had 'straightened-out' the store into 'good working order' like this, he entered a normal routine of coming to the store at nine in the morning and roam the aisles to make sure all was to his liking, and finding people to write up for things he didn't like. Then he'd retire to the office where he would spend his time scrutinizing the time cards and crunching the numbers. Soon after he had come to run the store Bud had taken up to calling me ''Sport''. I hadn't had a nickname since my high school days so I didn't mind until I found out a few months later that Bud had named his dog at home ''Sport'' and deemed me to be his store's version. Why? Because of the stuttering or my mixed raced background? Or was I simply chosen at random to be dubbed that? Who knows, I didn't worry about it and just did my job.

Apparently I did my job well enough and I was never written up nor did Bud ever have any complaints he felt I needed to know about and by the end of this year he would be gone to whip a new business into shape for his ''investor'' boss.

Goodbye.

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The Technique

27

I'd like to talk about 'The Technique', as I'll dub it. I had first experienced it at a doctor's office and a few more times dealing with doctors and their staffs, so my first impression was that it was a technique taught at medical schools or something as it became so common in my experiences going forward. But then, nearing the mid nineteen nineties, I saw it from a few people who had nothing to do with the medical community and I instead concluded it was a common human technique. Either way, it's just as silly.

For shy of a full year I had been seeing the specialist about my knuckle and knee pains, now accompanied by periodic pulsing headaches, and he had become as frustrated as I had. He had first erroneously concluded it was Lyme Disease, but when the blood tests had come back negative, he discontinued the antibiotics he'd placed me on even though they had helped. He had since done x-rays of my joints and found nothing of note about them and had just settled into prescribing me little pills that had no effect. About six months into seeing him, I discovered that a close relative had recently been diagnosed with Lupus and I asked the doctor if that might apply to me. He assured me that ''Men don't get Lupus'' so I didn't need to worry about it. With nothing else coming to mind, his only recourse was to have me take more of the pills that didn't work, apparently in the hope that at some point it would help.  It didn't occur to him to try a different medication.

While the pain was unpleasant it didn't significantly effect my mobility much and I just worked through it as I stocked the shelves at the grocery store. The knuckle pain didn't get worse as I typed in my homework or stories into the word processor, the knee pain didn't get worse if I took long walks late at night, it just persisted as is. I couldn't figure out what triggered the headaches, but at least they weren't perpetual. The best thing I could do was just to keep busy or distract myself from it. As I would often be one of the employees stocking the shelves from a fresh truckload of boxes in the early hours of the morning, it occurred to me to listen to tapes of music as I worked. Though an effective distraction, management came to me within a week to inform me I couldn't do that as I worked, even though the store was closed and there were no customers I needed to worry about.

And so I found myself back at the specialist's office for another visit to see what we could do about the pain. On one of these visits the specialist came in and asked if I wanted to tryout morphine with a smile on his face. Assuming he was joking, I played along and said, ''I don't think we need to worry about that yet.''

His smile was gone and he exploded with an accusatory finger, ''I knew it! That's all you're here for!'' and he turned and fled the room. I say fled, as that was his emotional reaction, but to be objective, he left the room at a very brisk walk, not a run, and slammed the door behind him. I was dumbfounded and just sat there assuming he'd come back and I'd have my appointment. After twenty minutes I went to the examination room door and opened it and waited for the nurse to pass by and ask when the doctor would be coming back. She seemed surprised and said she'd ask and I settled back into the room. Then she came and told me that I had already seen the doctor and my appointment was over...

Really? I thought. Was he expecting a co-pay for that? When I walked out to the front desk, sure enough, they were expecting a co-payment. They also asked when the doctor wanted to see me again, I told them I had no clue as the doctor and I hadn't discussed my health issues at all. So they once again called to the nurse in back and the nurse took some time to come back with the answer and it was: I didn't need to come back. And so that ended my relationship with the specialist and any apparent hope of ever of addressing my joint pains. I would later hear from my mother's primary doctor months later that the specialist had dropped me because I had been demanding morphine from him. This was news to me. And this confused the primary doctor as well as I had never asked him for morphine, either.

And that, in a nutshell, is the technique I was talking about. You say something that you deep-down know can't be supported and you run off before the person you said it to can respond and leave you feeling like a fool for saying it. As I said, I've come to know this technique well, from the position of the person being dumped on, not the one doing the dump & flee, myself. Has this happened to you? Do you do this yourself? Do people live their entire lives with this as a common technique in their communication with others? Or I should probably say, lack of communication with others?

The first time this happened, it was perplexing and a little silly. In three years time it would become an all too familiar experience...

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New Beginnings

26

And so came Nineteen Eighty-Six.

The hardware store next to my grocery store had experienced a downturn in its own business when our shelves had gone bare and decided to find a new home. They settled on a space next to the second warehouse-sized, non-union grocery store two and a half miles away. Perhaps they had also heard of the new warehouse-sized hardware store that would be opening up across the street corner as well... But for the grocery store itself, it was taken over by the courts, the details of what had happened to the original ownership came out, and court appointed management took their place. Since my years working at my next door neighbor's grocery store chain during my childhood, this was probably the best management I'd worked under in my adult life. All business focused and politics free.

With new funds now available, truck loads of groceries arrived to fill the long emptied shelves and new employees hired to replace those who had left during the downturn. Further, the store now offered various insurance plans to entice employees to stay and for the first time in my life, I had my very own health and disability insurance. A new fourth guy was added to our ranks in the dairy & frozen foods section and his mother took a job in the bakery. Store uniforms were handed out, they had two types: The white polo shirt with the store name embroidered onto them and the green classic tee-shirt with the store name silk screened onto them. I took the tee shirt to stay with my jeans and tees look. These shirts had originally been available under the Svensons, but only if you paid for them. Now, it was part of a new store pride that the shirts were distributed for free yet, in return, wearing them was now mandatory.

I started classes at the accredited College, the big brother to the Business College I had started out at. My credits from two years at the Business College were transferred and in just over two years I'd have the bachelors degree in Computer Science and be able to put my grocery store years behind me, permanently. The College had rented out a disused catholic girls high school building which provided it twice the space of the Business College and we used about three quarters of that. The remaining quarter was still used by the nuns and we'd see one or two walk down the halls from time to time as we bustled between classes.

Unlike the previous place, where night classes were two classes per night Mondays that met again on Wednesdays, and two more classes for Tuesdays that met again on Thursdays, this place had one course per night for three and a half hours with a twenty minute break half way through. At the Business College I had taken three courses each quarter and tested out of a fourth, by the time I'd reached this accredited College, I had already tested out of the easier courses and chose to take four classes per week for the first time since I started in the Fall of Nineteen Eighty-Three. One semester of that, along with my renewed full-time grocery store job and one day a week computer room monitoring & tutoring job, it was too much, and I was back to three classes per semester for the rest of my time there.

At the grocery store, where there had originally been four part-time employees and two full-timers for our section, having it as just four full-timers posed a problem. Essentially we part-timers had been tasked with breaking down the truck loads then focused on getting the frozen food into the cold cases before it melted, then finish our mornings by filling the dairy cases with the new stock. The full-timers over lapped during the daytime and evening hours to monitor the cases throughout the core day with one or two of us part-timers filling in on their days off. Now that simply wasn't an option and two of us would run the pallets of new dairy stock into the refrigerator rooms, then fill the frozen food cases till they were done. Any time remaining we would get a start on the dairy, but that stock was to be mainly filled by the daytime and evening people as time permitted between other tasks. It turned out the other daytime tasks were pretty light so it wasn't a problem and we came to realize just how easy it had been for the original two full-timers of our department under the Svensons.

Our guy in charge, one of the original three remaining hires from day one at the store, had no issue with my night classes and Saturday job, so we never had a scheduling conflict. Thus my work hours dovetailed nicely into the hours of classes and all seemed right with the world, work-wise...

By the Spring of Nineteen Eighty-Six, the bankruptcy management era of the store would be over and new owners would buy the store and take over management.

Not for the better.

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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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The Three Best Things I Got From My Father

24

As I had started during the nights when I first went to bed at the age of thirteen, I would reflect on a part of my life as I waited to fall asleep. Often it would be about the events of the day and what meaning they might have on my unfolding life. In the case of my third full year in Colorado, I decided to consider what were the three best things I had gotten from my father. In the case of my mother, it seemed pretty clear: Honesty about my mixed race background, Gutsiness to go out and try something new, and Resolve to continue on a path even if the day-to-day isn't fun.

While my mother and her father had kept their Native American ancestry a secret and denied it whenever their background was questioned, mother raised me to be accepting of my mixed race background and open about it. I had. And on the whole it had been a good choice. While a very few had made fun of that heritage, being open about it only gave them a specific label to use when they would otherwise have made fun of me for something else. It's better to be made fun of for something that is true rather than for something that is false, isn't it? Also, not being in denial about it never lead me into the trap of trying to prove to others that I was less accepting of mixed race people than them thus assuaging any suspicion about my own ancestry.

While I had not always been thrilled with my mother's choice to move to Colorado, leaving my New England childhood environment behind, I had to admire her courage. Her first move out of the family home during my parents' separation had been to a nearby town that was closer to where she already worked, not a big change in the scheme of things. But to move to Colorado in her mid-fifties without any job lined-up, no friends to welcome her here and help her get settled, that was inarguably gutsy and I had to admire her for it.

So too, for the resolve to see it through. I could tell by August of her first few months in Colorado that she was having second thoughts, fantasizing that someone from New England would come out and carry her back to the only homeland she had ever known. But as she had made the choice to move to Colorado, she steeled herself to stay and make that new life work, even if it didn't seem like the best decision during the first couple of years. Sure enough, after years of perseverance, she had found herself a better job than she had ever had when it came to pay and benefits, she had made new friends to replace the ones she had left behind, and had even had a string of new lovers, though ultimately none ever panned-out to that second chance of a lifelong relationship she had hoped for.

And now for my father, what had he given me...?

As I lay in bed racking my brain, I realized just how much of a discounted role he played in my life, with the negatives easily overshadowing the positives I was looking for, but then came the most obvious: A love of Science Fiction. While never intentionally introducing me to it, I grew up in a home with plenty of exposure. From science fiction television shows which tickled the imagination, to the many books on shelves of possible future lives, some aspirational, some forewarning, some simply an escape from the daily grind of today. All called to me and my heart answered back.

And a second thing?

I had to acknowledge one day in my later elementary school years when my father had taught me a valuable lesson. My friend Pete and I were practicing shots at the basket ball hoop in my family home's driveway. As we did this, Pete was teaching me a new rhyme he had learned at camp the previous summer that we could say in rhythm to the bouncing basket ball as we got ready for our next shots. I don't remember it now, but it was something about the relationship of whites and blacks and used the N-word as part of the rhyme. My father was home that day and bustling about the yard and over-heard this and called me over. He quietly explained to me that the N-word was a racist putdown and I shouldn't use it, even casually as part of what seemed a playful rhyme. It was not simply because it was a put down, but by using it and other racist terms in my life, it would limit the people I would meet and come to know and I would be the poorer for it. When I returned to Pete he asked me what that was about and I simply told him that we shouldn't use the rhyme anymore. Yet, following my father's advice, I've kept use of racial terms to a minimum, only when discussing matters of those terms with friends, but never casually for fun and never as a put down to anybody.

But what was the third lesson I had gotten from my father which had the most impact on my life?

I could only think of the time when I was with him at the ski area during the off season and he was discussing some new ideas with his boss. While my father managed the day-to-day activities at the park, he actually did have a supervisor of his own, appointed by the owner, to keep an eye on things and consider ways of enhancing the property. As his job wasn't hands-on, this supervisor was rarely there on site, at least during my years passively observing the operations of the ski area. I would hear about him from time to time, right down to how my family's first home had been across the street from his own before I was born. But his office was almost always vacant and I saw him maybe a total of five times in ten years. This was one of those times as he was in and wanting to discuss an idea he had for expanding the use of the ski area.

My father would listen to his idea, the pros & cons he had thought of on his own, and then asked my father for his thoughts. My father just reflected back the pros & cons the supervisor had already stated and asked the supervisor what he thought. I was surprised as, when asked for his opinion, my father had ended up adding nothing and tossed the question right back like a hot potato. The supervisor juggled the returning balls of the idea and the pros & cons he had already thought of for a bit, but then really wanted to know what my father thought. This time my father talked at length about the pros & cons the supervisor had expressed, debating each one in the same way the supervisor had then, after a thorough recounting, asked the supervisor what he was thinking, again adding nothing at all to the debate. I was appalled as my father seemed to lack either any original thoughts of his own on the matter, or lacked the courage to express them. Either way, even if the supervisor was holding his cool, I was feeling the frustration for him. He again restated his idea and how it might help or hurt the park and again asked my father for his thoughts on the matter. My father simply again waffled, rephrased, and ultimately gave nothing back.

I concluded at that moment that I would never fear giving my opinion about something I was asked about and to always be decisive and not wishy-washy when I had enough facts in front of me and a decision needed to be made. And I have stuck to that tenet and never regretted it.

Though I have since learned discretion...

While the three best things I had gotten from my mother were positive if sometimes hard learned examples, I've always been haunted that to get three out of my experience with my father, I've have to include a lesson I learned despite his example, not from it.

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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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