Many years ago I took a job as a UNIX Systems Engineer. It was cool, and I liked working with Unix, but, one day, I found myself locked in a half-assed server room on a Saturday night with a woman who, like me, had no idea what we should do.
UNIX is an operating system for computers. If you’ve seen the movie Jurassic Park, Newman and Samuel L. Jackson use UNIX to build the security system to contain the dinosaurs. I hate when Lex, the girl, in a desperate attempt to save herself and her annoying brother from the velociraptor, starts clicking around on the computer, and says, “It’s a UNIX system. I know this!”
That ruined the movie for me. Sure, you might be able to resurrect dinosaurs by splicing frog DNA into 500 million year-old dinosaur DNA recovered from amber, but create an easy-to-use system based on UNIX in the 90s? Easy enough for the grandchild of a millionaire to figure out?
Nope. Maybe the butler could have figured out UNIX, but not the spoiled rotten kid. (I know she was a nice kid in the movie, but people with lots of money are usually nice: they don’t have to work very hard.)
Which brings us back to me locked in a room with a woman and a UNIX system.
The various State of Michigan government agencies had a hundred or so UNIX systems scattered about, and I was the UNIX guy for the company that owned the support contract. This one computer needed an upgrade, but they didn’t want to take it offline during working hours. I arrived at five o’clock in the evening that Saturday and began the work.
The woman was the department manager, responsible for whatever happened, so she was either my babysitter or my chaperone, however you want to look at it. It certainly wasn’t a fun date. Nothing went right that evening.
It was the early days of the Internet and you had to figure a lot of stuff out by yourself. The closest thing we had to “online support” was that some vendors would provide massive archives of all the system manuals. We’d download them and browse through the manuals, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
We were attempting to install a new, fancy printer, which required a SCSI interface board, which required an UNIX upgrade, and I had to install two different device drivers. At around three o’clock in the morning, I learned a few things.
First: this woman was patient and kind. She came to understand that none of the vendors were available for weekend support, and so maybe this would have to be done during business hours. That she didn’t get angry taught me that maybe she’d been through a some tough shit that I couldn’t even imagine. (Or maybe she was so nice because she was secretly rich and only worked for a distraction.)
Second: I no longer wanted this job. I’d already been pulled to a dozen different departments with similar problems in just a couple of months, and everybody wanted stuff done on the weekends. It wasn’t going to get better any time soon.
Third: I was so tired and frustrated that if a velociraptor was pounding and clawing on the door, intent on devouring me, I would have opened the door and waited for my demise. I realized I had a limit to the amount of bullshit I could endure, and money wouldn’t change that.
My employer was a mess, anyway. One of my stories in Ten Stories is about my time there, and it doesn’t even scratch the surface of the narcissistic owner, his sharp-tongued wife, and her sleazy lover, who, together, formed the company’s management team. Those of us on the engineering team splintered into two groups, the Netware guys in one and the Banyan Vines-UNIX coalition in the other, and we hated each other.
To top it off, the company threatened me with a lawsuit after I left.
Someday I will seek my revenge, but it will be in the fictional world of a novel crafted word by word in my spare time.
Meanwhile, at My Writing Desk…
I’ve been focused on launching my next novel, Ashley Undone. My wife is proofreading, the first advance reader copies are out, and I hope you’ll consider reading it too!
Ashley Undone is about a young woman who is so desperate to save her father from the clutches of greed that she destroys his business with a RansomWare attack; but she unleashes her stepmother’s fury, and Ashley must fight to save her father’s life.
How do you become an advance reader?
- Get an ebook and side-load it using this link
- Get an ebook as an email attachment by contacting me at “mick@mickeyhadick-11cc4d6.ingress-earth.ewp.live”
- I’ll also have a few paperbacks available, so contact me and ask about that
Maybe You’d Like
This week I’ve joined with authors for a Free Fantasy & Paranormal giveaway. You’ll find my book, The Blue Djin and the American Dream in there…
https://storyoriginapp.com/to/ZpkUJhg
Next Picayune
Thanks for reading the Mickey Picayune. I’ll be back in two weeks with another edition.
All the best,
Mickey Hadick
P.S. Here’s that link one more time: https://story.mickeyhadick.com/ashley-undone