That’s me, a computer addict. Addicted to my computer. That is not the worst of it, I addicted Ginny to it too and have now have Marty addicted.
It all started 40 years ago. When I went to work for a computerized tax processing company. Back when everything was entered in the computer by using keypunch cards. Do you even know what that is? Everything was punched into cards, verified by someone else, then sorted into order on a card reader so that the information on the cards could be understood by a computer to process it. Provided it wasn’t too complicated. I’m talking, pre spreadsheets programs, Excel, Access, and almost anything else we take for granted today.
At the time, all our room full of equipment was good for was to read the cards, transfer the information to a plastic tape, so we could send the tape to Stanford University for actual processing. Then back to us to print out the results that had to be manually sorted to finish a tax return. It was high tech at the time. It fascinated me how those little bits of holes ended in finished printed tax returns. That was really fascinating.
I worked there for a little over 5 years and after the end of my first marriage, I tried selling real estate. Boy, I really could have used a computer then. Looking up properties in a book or on 4”x6”cards for everything requested for a property. Real manual job to find a property to show a client.
Two years later after my second marriage, my new bride (Ginny) and I went trucking. I sure could have used a laptop then. Too bad, no one had thought of it yet. That was back in ‘78
By 1980 Radio Shack had TRS 80s (Trash80s) available, all 32K of it. We paid $3,200 for one with a dot matrix printer. We had entered the computer age. I would spend all night writing simple programs, like adding columns of numbers and printing out a list. Boy!! Was I a computer wiz kid!! Ginny would not even look at that ‘damn machine’. Waste of time to her. That was about her attitude for the next 10 years and several up graded computers later. Until she was forced to work on one by her employer. They changed their word processing to a computer, because it saved time and money. They could have gotten just a word processor, but thought that maybe they would find another use for the computer. Ginny just stayed with the word processing.
By that time I was off on the new thing, the Internet. Up all night. Again, online. According to Ginny, ‘Damn waste of time’. Until, she got laid off and was home for a few days. I would go to work, Ginny would be online, I would come home after work and she had barely moved. She was hooked. By the end of the week she had a business going and knew people all around the world. Another junkie in the making.
That was back in the early ‘90s. Since then, computers have improved and the Internet has grown and we have had an on-again-off-again relationship. Ginny has written her book after her bout with the big “C” and spends most days writing emails or playing on Pogo. Now that I am retired, I spend most of my day on line. Designing sites and trying to find away to make a few bucks. Oh! And occasionally writing this blog.
One of the first things I did when I retired was to enlarge the computer room. It now takes up about a third of our abode. Ginny has her corner and I have mine. Almost, back to back. Together but a part. Her doing her thing and I’m doing mine. We still have not gotten to the point of emailing each other to break for lunch or anything like that. We still can talk.
Marty spends his time when not patrolling the neighborhood, laying next to one of us while we are staring at the screen and making funny movements with our fingers. He does supervise the entries into his blog, being his paws don’t fit the keyboard. He seems addicted too.
We have a folding table that we use for our breakfast, lunch, dinner, game table and other stuff that calls for a level surface. It goes up and down several times a day, and Marty leave every time we do it. It makes too much noise for him. The folded table fell over once, made a loud bang and scared the hell out of him, so he isn’t taking any chances.
Our relationship to our computers is like the experiences of trucking, too many stories to tell and I can just tell a little at a time or you would die of boredom.
Until next time, may your God keep you safe.........
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