Volume: 2

Trailing Edge Technology

A career restart.

The job was at UOC, the Ugly Oil Company, located in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Neither I nor UOC could believe our luck. UOC had been hunting for months trying to find someone who knew the ancient Fortran programming language. In the middle of the nineties, technical people, except me, had migrated to newer languages, especially those that brought information to the emerging World Wide Web. For me, UOC provided a restart. Even though I would still be working on an old language on an old machine, UOC promised to train me in much newer technologies, sending me to expensive classes that would bring me up to speed in the dominant database software from Oracle.

The neglect, laziness, rationalization, journaling and plain old fun of the previous years flipped in a single phone interview. After I met Jimmy Vault on my first day, he took the staff out to an expensive lunch in which seven people downed six bottles of wine, declared the rest of the day unusable and went home. "If that's a Monday, I can't wait to see a Friday," I wrote to no one. My new digs consisted of a suite of nine vacant offices that surrounded an open space of twelve equally empty desks that once hosted a couple of dozen employees, part of a 19,000 strong UOC workforce. When I found my office, lined with walls of manuals, a giant desk with three dumb computer terminals, a PC and my own coffee station, that number had been pared to 8,000. Silence filled empty caverns that once hosted steno pools, middle managers and finely coiffed secretaries. My new workspace was larger than my home.