Will the Real Dave Backus Please Stand-Up
In May of 1981 Kathy and I packed up all our stuff and moved from the Rosemont (Sacramento) duplex we were living in to a house in Sunnyvale. I started my new job at Siegel Software and Kathy started her new job with another marketing firm.
Siegel was a very small consulting firm with a total of 6 people counting the owner. There was a receptionist/admin/secretary person, Jon, the owner, and four programmers. The programmers consisted of me, two programmers who had been with Jon for a long while and then Jim who'd been there for maybe a year. They were all programming in the COBOL language which I had no actual work experience with. I had taken one class in college on it and COBOL is not a difficult language to learn. The deal I had with Jon was he'd give me COBOL experience and having me on his staff gave him an experienced “Micro” computer programmer. His current clients were all in the mainframe world. The computers in GBS ran on a one-of-a-kind operating system using their own language so my experience was rather limited, but I did also have a small amount of experience with the UNIX operating system that would soon be the dominate operating system in that arena.
Jim was assigned to help with me on my COBOL programming and he took his assignment seriously. Initially he had me reading COBOL and IBM operating system manuals. After two days of this I went into Jon's office and told him I think I should do this at home as I'm at the point where I can learn just about as much lying down on my couch with the manual by my side and my eyes closed as I can reading any more of these boring manuals here at the office. I don't think Jon actually heard me as he replied that's fine with him. So I went home. The next day I talked with Jon again and he agreed it was time for me to get a programming assignment. He asked Jim to give me some work. Jim did and let me know he would be reviewing it. Jim followed what he saw as standard “structured programming” “rules” and he quickly pointed out where he felt there were flaws in my programming style. I thanked him for his help but the problem was I was a better programmer than him and as a consequence, I tended to ignore a number of his “helpful” suggestions. He was not too happy about it. Luckily, for me, the top programmer in the place, Maggie, reviewed my code as well. She evidently was impressed and told Jon. Between Jon and Maggie Jim backed off trying to get me to always do things his way. Jim was a pretty good programmer, he just didn't always see things as I did.
COBOL is a pretty easy programming language. To me COBOL's biggest flaw from a programming point of view is that it's not a particularly fun language to program in. The problem for programmers like myself was that something like 80% of all business applications were programmed in that language. If you wanted a job as an application programmer it behooved you to know and be willing to program in COBOL.
On the home front Kathy and I seemed to be settling in. Kathy wanted us to buy a house. We looked at a few. The one I really liked was in Campbell. It was listed at $115,000. That seemed crazy to me. That was almost twice what I thought a house like that should cost. I couldn't see buying a house for that much money so we stopped looking to buy a house. Of course later I would come to realize buying that house would have been a wise decision, financially anyway.
That summer my good friend Frank from Oregon was getting married to his girlfriend Berta up in Eugene. We took a week off from work to go up for the wedding. Frank was moving out of his small apartment to a new place where he and Berta would live. Berta had moved here from Chile. Berta was a gentile soul and she made the excellent salsa and also the best Chile Relleno, which was a favorite of mine at the time. Her sister was a chef at on of Eugene's top restaurants. Frank told us that we could stay in his old apartment while we were there. It was a sort of studio apartment with a bathroom. It had a little kitchen off one side and a large closet on the other. It had once been a porch and it was a little rustic but it was now an enclosed room off the back of Berta's sister's house with its own private entrance. It looked out to Patterson Alley behind the house. When I lived in Eugene 4 other friends of mine lived off that alley. It had a counter-culture vibe. Frank had lived there for years. The floor was covered with a large straw mat. The room had a row of windows on two sides with light, translucent coverings but the windows were fairly high up about 5 feet, and the room itself was 3 or 4 feet above ground level. I don't remember if it had a lock on the door, it might not have. Heck I only locked the door to my dwellings in Eugene when I was leaving town for a few days. Most of my friends did the same. I rarely locked my car as well. Kathy took one look at Frank's place and immediately informed me that she couldn't stay in a place like that. I was like “What?” The place may have been a little rustic but it was clean and in the part of town where I wanted to be. I'd spent most of my adult life in similar places. This place didn't even have pests, it was actually better than most of the other places. I couldn't understand her discomfort. I told her “I'm staying here and you can get a motel room if you don't want to sleep here.” I know, that was a bit harsh. The place to me was a reflection of the real me. I'd spent many a night there. I didn't understand the problem. I couldn't, and I suppose I didn't even try to see things from Kathy's perspective. To me it was like she was rejecting a lifestyle that I saw as mine. I felt abandoned and I'm sure she was feeling the same way about me, although at the time I could only think about myself. It felt like Kathy was rejecting me. Of course for her it was like I was picking what she saw as a run down place over her and I was rejecting her. Berta's sister came to the rescue and offered Kathy the use of a little apartment she had in another part of town that was more to Kathy's liking. However the damage had been done. Kathy became sick and stayed sick for our entire visit. So I ended up staying most nights at Frank's old place anyway. I'm not even sure if Kathy made it to the wedding. She managed to recover at the end of our stay, the day we planned to head home.
When it was time to return to Sunnyvale both Valerie and Cyd, two friends from Eugene, needed a ride to San Francisco so we offered them a ride. It was hot the day we drove down and we didn't have air conditioning in our car. When we got to the Lake Shasta area. I suggested we stop and find a place for a short swim. Kathy was not particularly enthusiastic but Val and Cyd were all for it. We were all stinking hot, well I was anyway. I pulled off the highway and found a place under an overpass where we could all jump in. Cyd, Valerie and I all started to strip down. Kathy said she didn't have a bathing suit. I told her “That's OK, none of us do. We won't be using bathing suits. It's naked or underwear” Kathy then let me know that she would not be swimming and wanted us all to go back to the car and continue on. I said “Hey, we're here now I'm going to at least take a quick dip.” She was not happy but I was ready to cool off in the water so I stripped down, taking off all my clothes and jumped in. Val and Cyd did the same. We swam around a bit, got dressed and jumped back into the car. The conversation for the rest of the drive was minimal to put it mildly.
I've always been drawn to a sort of progressive bohemian laid back lifestyle. That was where I felt most comfortable and that was how I saw myself. Eugene had a lot of that and Frank's place fit in with that. It wasn't only Frank's apartment, Kathy seemed to not approve of my friends as well. Kathy's adverse reaction felt like a betrayal, like she was rejecting who I really was or maybe it was who I wished I was. Regardless, that me was so bothersome to her that she became physically sick. That caused me to feel that she didn't really know me and this trip seemed to point out that what we valued was very different. We tried to patch up our differences once we got home but the relationship had been damaged in a way that was going to be hard to recover from. I know Kathy loved me but it seemed the me she saw was different from the me I felt I was. How were we going to make this work? As I look back I realize our relationship was never the same after that trip.
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