Disclaimer: this is the story as I remember it. very likely to be incomplete and/or incorrect, but a story nonetheless. Leave comments for corrections. oh, and tell me when i should stop.

So, I met JLG in the fall of 1998, my sophomore year. I had just retired from rowing, and for the first time in five years, i didn’t have anything to define me. No more morning and evening work outs. No more racing season. No more team for which to fight. All the things that I loved at that time–the competition, the water, the comraderie–were gone. I was listless to say the least. However, more important that my listlessness was my peasantry. And so, on the advice of a fraternity brother, i walked into the Center for Career Services looking for a job.

If the credits in this story were to roll in order of appearance, Pat Macken’s name would show up first. A cameo in this film, but pivitol nonetheless. She was the one who greeted me at CCS, asked me what i was looking for, and then walked me upstairs to meet Tawana. At the time, i had a familiarity with computers. Back then I could actually navigate my way around a Windows98 box, and what little html i knew i had learned in Gateway. Tawana asked me a few questions which i no longer remember and a few minutes later i was in the employ of CCS.

The job wasn’t that hard. I ran around trouble shooting the staff’s computer troubles, maintaining the public workstations, and kicking the Jake printers every now and then. When i wasn’t running around, I’d be up in the office fixing various web pages across the CCS site.

At the time, the IT office was right outside the CCS Director’s office. In one corner, there was a large desk that took up one quadrant of the room and along the remaining two walls of the office were wall-facing desks with about four workstations all together.

Since Tawana had hired me, i assumed the big desk was hers. But it wasn’t. As it turned out I sat next to her at one of the smaller workstation desks along with the other work study kids, nithia and velma. The big desk belonged to John. I think JLG was a spritely 23 years of age back then. Our introduction was brief. Nothing more than a handshake and a curt hello before he put his headphones on and buried himself behind his monitor–a bit ironic that six years later he’d draw a portrait of me in a similar position. I’d later learn that JLG had confessed his dislike for me. a “yahoo”, he said i was.
As the year progressed, I started growing on hime, or at least i thought. He started me off with some javascript programming and eventually moved me into application development work. The tool of the hour back then was MadSearch2 the sequel to the wildly successful MadSearch. It was actually pretty slick for it’s day. A fully integrated template and datastore development kit. Back then there was no php, and perl or c++ cgi development was a bit of a bear since we worked off of AcIS servers and they didn’t support it. So, MadSearch2 it was. JLG had also given birth to Madness–our in house version of Monster/JobTrak which at the time were still two separate companies each courting us to switch over–which was some combination of MadSearch2, C++ and Paradox macros, i want to say. It was a pretty comprehensive system and coordinated a whole bunch of stuff that i still don’t know about.

Being the young’n, i didn’t get to play with Madness. Instead, i was put on smaller projects like the library resources database (the longest living project in our history!), and what i’d call calendar v0.0.0.0.1 which was more like a cms tool to allow staff members to program events onto the website.

And so for a while, things were good. Building these apps was a lot of fun, the work environment was great, I was learning a lot. But, all good things come to and end and john walked in one day and announced that he was leaving to work for AcIS. Actually, he didn’t tell me directly. I heard it through the grapevine. Which was fine and dandy and all. It wasn’t that consequential for me as I’d only been working there for a couple of months. Besides, as time passed I would come to learn that this wouldn’t be the only time JLG gave me the ditch.

So, we had a party for John. People were crying. I was eating cake. And, after a few weeks, things had calmed down. At least until Tawana announced that she was leaving. Now, this announcement had some repercussions for me. All of a sudden I found myself alone at the top of the CCS IT mountain. Well, actually, at this point, it wasn’t exactly a mountain. It was just me, and if you ever get a copy of my old resume, you’ll see the description of this time as follows:

During critical period, assumed the responsibilities of Director of Information Technology, Center for Career Services.

There it was. The peak of my career.

Granted, it’s nice to have on a resume and it was also nice to get the big desk in the room. But, i was only a sophomore in college and pretty much in over my head. My daily tasks began to center exclusively on fixing boxen and assuring people that you can’t replace the lightbulb in a computer monitor.

Luckily, after a few months, John saw the error in his move to AcIS and returned to reclaim his throne. In the end, i guess i have to thank him for his brief absence, since, during his time away, CCS was desperate to keep me onboard. And so, with desperation and one of James Mbote’s uncanny typos, i happily acquiesced the IT throne in return for a $12 and hour summer internship with paid housing.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2006 at 5:58 am and is filed under CCIT, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.