My column usually focuses on news, but I'd like to take a few moments to reflect on my own career. How, you may ask, does one become the editor in chief of a high-quality technology publication such as Network Computing? Did I study journalism? No, I had to be satisfied with learning about black music, Spanish literature and Marxian economics (which is useful only in the event of an armed revolution of the proletariat). So I must have spent a lot of time learning about programming and keeping computer systems up and running, right? Wrong again.
My career path has led me through an array of grueling and pointless positions. I worked as an amusement-park garbageman, answering to a man we affectionately called Phil the Paper Picker. Phil's whole life was garbage. While I gathered trash with a long pick, Phil stooped over and hustled around, grabbing papers with his hands. It's faster that way. While I held wet, maggot-covered bags out at my side, Phil slung 'em over his shoulder.
Garbage fascinated Phil. One day we found bins containing 20 gallons of milk that had been baking in the sun all summer. Tossing them into the back of the truck, we prepared to squeeze the life out of them. Phil just had to see what 20 gallons of milk looked like getting squished by 15 tons of hydraulic pressure. After pulling the lever, I watched Phil as he gazed at the milk. I heard the awful sound of the putrid fluid being released from its plastic confines and saw a sea of white liquid and chunks squirt out all over Phil. He was soaked from head to toe, and curdled hunks of milk hung in his hair and mustache. A smell unlike anything I had ever encountered hung in the air and clung to Phil. "Man, you've got to get home and take a shower," we told him. Five minutes later, Phil returned. He had simply removed his outer shirt. Now that's dedication.
Next up was a textile factory that makes the material used for those crushed-black-velvet Elvis paintings. I inhaled pounds and pounds of tiny, fake velvet fibers, all the while wondering how much aerobic capacity I was sacrificing.
On a subsequent job, I spent a week bottling gasohol for a guy with love written on the knuckles of one hand and hate on the knuckles of other.
Then, I sold chili dogs to drunks who reckoned that a good dose of beans, meat and tomato sauce would counteract the effects of alcohol and keep them safe from arrest. It didn't work. What did work was my Crocodile Dundee-style maneuver to scare off a woman who pulled a knife on me while I was selling the chili dogs. I showed her my bread knife, which was three times the size of her weapon, and that settled that.
These jobs didn't teach me much about technology, but they did impart one critical lesson: I learned I didn't want to do any of them for the rest of my life. They made me work much harder on what I really wanted to do, which was to write. I feel blessed that it all worked out. Send stories about your career nightmares to me at dbarney@nwc.com.
Now let's squeeze in some news.
Cabletron Soon Gone
Cabletron has long had a reputation problem. Its co-founder and former leader Bob Levine flexed his stubby, overbuilt biceps without the least bit of prompting and fashioned a corporate culture as brutal and weird as any WWF story line. That's precisely why I've loved following the evolution of the company and why I will be in mourning on August 6 -- the day Cabletron will die.
In its place we'll have Enterasys (no jokes please), its subsidiary Aprisma (sounds like some kind of vegetable matter) and Riverstone (hey, they did come up with one good name).
-- Doug Barney, dbarney@nwc.com
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