13 Everyman
I overslept. Kate woke me at seven for my morning exercise and breakfast. Two hours later, we were getting ready to take off. Kate set my computer on my lap. The display on the screen looked like a word processor with a few extra sections. “What’s this?”
As soon as I asked, text appeared on the screen. Kate said, “It’s MyStory, a speech-to-text storytelling app.”
Her words rolled out on the screen. She looked over and nodded. “Good. The mic is picking me up.”
“What’s going on?”
“Speech therapy. You’re having trouble making yourself understood, so we’re going to work on it.” She turned and winked. “You have to practice talking, and I want to know more about you. We can kill both birds with one exercise.”
“You already know everything worth knowing. The rest is boring.”
She started the RV and maneuvered out onto the highway. “Tell me about yourself.”
“I’m a retired engineer. A widower with two grown kids and some grandkids.”
“When did you retire?”
“2017.”
“Why?”
“I got tired of the BS.”
“How long did it take you to get to that point?”
“About forty years.”
“I mean, how long were you thinking about retiring before you made the decision to do it?”
“I was in charge of verification on our project. A couple of keystone cops had been assigned to write test procedures for me. Their mess ended up on my desk, and I had to clean it up. One day, the light dawned. It was time to retire.”
Interesting patterns scrolled across the screen. The app typed Kate’s words without error. Mine were unreadable. “They kept me around for eight months.”
“You must have been important.”
“My job was to find our screw-ups before the customer did. It was important because management didn’t want the customer complaining about our mistakes.”
Kate glanced over at the screen. “Not bad. I can clean it up.”
“What’s the point?”
“I want to figure out what we need to work on.” She smiled. “And I want to post your story online.”
“To bore people to death?”
She half-turned, flashing a mischievous grin. “There are websites that specialize in stories by elderly people. They get a lot of interest. Besides, I know your life wasn’t that dull.”
I shook my head. “Not for me. But I guarantee nobody wants to hear about it.”
Kate shrugged. “Try me.”
Technological development has exploded over my lifetime. At the end of World War II, society was adjusting to a new normal. The modern world was beginning to blossom, but we were still living and working in the stone age. Engineers used slide rules. Pocket calculators didn’t become available until I was in college. And most couldn’t afford them. Computers were a novelty. Programming languages were primitive. I remember working in assembly language, one step up from the bits and bytes used by computers. My career spanned the evolution of computers and programming languages. I moved into testing because I couldn’t keep pace with the developments.
“Here’s one example of how boring my life has been. Early in my career, I worked on a system with twenty-eight components, each the size of a large filing cabinet. It took two weeks to get one running after it was installed. The product was moth-balled when another company figured out how to do the job with a desktop computer. Today, your cell phone could do the job.”
“I can see where that would be disappointing,” Kate said.
“I was a consultant on Motorola’s Iridium Project when people still believed it might be a commercial success. Y2K was a nightmare. We had no idea how to keep the airlines running safely and on time, but the FAA needed a plan. We were making progress when the powers that be announced a solution. Fortunately for everybody, they got it right. Our plan was quietly scrapped.”
“Was Y2K really a problem?”
“I’ve heard a lot of people say it was nothing. For us, it was a nuclear bomb about to explode. Something had to be done. In my opinion, we were very lucky. Nobody was in charge. Any solution would have to be coordinated with groups all over the world. It would have to work with all kinds of software running on a wide variety of hardware platforms. It would have to be distributed to millions of devices. And it had to work right the first time.” I closed my eyes and took a breath as that sank in. “Y2K had all the ingredients of a disaster.”
“Your work wasn’t used?”
“I might as well have stayed home and watched TV.”
The drive to the Missouri Headwaters State Park took three hours. The day was pleasant. The Rockies were spectacular. We had plenty of time to talk about the companies I had worked for and the projects I had worked on.
When we reached the park, we ate some lunch and stretched our legs. I settled for a short walk along the river.
As soon as we were back on the road, Kate asked, “How did you get started in engineering?”
“I was good in math and science. Engineering looked like a promising career. Electrical engineers were the superstars.”
We went on to talk about my early years. I attended Cook Elementary and Roxborough High. Schools I could walk to from our apartment in the Roxborough neighborhood of Philadelphia. Dad worked at the Shipyard. Mom taught third grade at Cook.
There was plenty to do outside of school. Softball, football, basketball, swimming, skating – in the winter, we played ice hockey on a nearby pond. I joined the track team in my freshman year of high school. I tried out for football and basketball, but I was too small and too slow.
I graduated with honors from the Math and Science curriculum. Getting accepted into college was no problem. I chose The University of Pennsylvania because it was local. My family could swing the in-state tuition. I had to work part-time to cover the other costs.
Penn acquired a brand new IBM 1401 in 1959. I was lucky enough to get into the computer programming course as a sophomore. It was enough to convince me that I liked working with computers.
When I returned from Vietnam, all engineering students had to take programming courses. I ended up in the same class as Anne. Flirting with her was the highlight of my day, even though I didn’t expect anything to happen. That changed when I took her to the Homecoming Dance.
We started going together. It was a stretch. I was on the GI Bill and working weekends to pay for necessities. Dating her was a luxury that I couldn’t live without.
I brought her to our family dinner at Christmas. When Dad found out she was a Campbell, he brought up the feud between the MacGregors and the Campbells. Anne said, “Gregor MacGregor’s wife was a Campbell. When her man was captured and executed, she poured out her heart in an elegy. It is one of the most beautiful poems in the literature of the British Isles.”
The feud was never again mentioned.
Anne married me that June. I went to work for Raytheon at the navy yard on a contract to supply communications equipment. Later we moved to Cherry Hill. I worked on communications systems. She worked on computers. That was before the invention of Computer Science.
After Junior was born, she became a stay at home mom. When the kids left the house, she found a job as a librarian.
##
It was mid-afternoon when Kate parked near the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula. Before we got out, she said, “Mac, I want to go on to Lewiston.”
“I thought you weren’t going to push too hard.”
“I know.” She grimaced. “But it’s too early to stop, and Lewiston is the half-way point. If we just take a quick look around here, I can get us there by eight.”
“Isn’t that a little late?”
“We can find someplace to stop for dinner in a couple of hours, and I can still get us there by nine.”
I shook my head. Kate asked, “Do you really want to spend your afternoon checking out another fort?”
“No.”
“You wanted me to see the Rockies. Route 12 follows a river through the mountains. It parallels the route Lewis and Clark took.”
We walked around and looked at the exhibits for the next twenty minutes. The museum shows the life of nineteenth-century settlers as well as the fort that was built for their protection. A regiment of Buffalo Soldiers, the 25th, was stationed in Missoula for a while. The 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps was formed in 1896 to test the viability of using bicycles in place of horses. The Army decided it wouldn’t work after the unit made a 2000-mile ride from Missoula to St. Louis.
##
We took off for Lewiston shortly after four. Kate started a Clive Cussler novel featuring a couple of his stock characters, Sam and Remi Forge. They were starting a school for girls in Nigeria and battling some bad guys.