On Living with a Computer Guy

I feel sorry for my wife, but it’s her fault for marrying a computer guy.

I’ve told her that if she married and astronomer, there would be a telescope in every room. “Why do we need another telescope, tell me that: dear,” she would say, and I’d shrug my shoulders and say, “Well, how could I not buy it! It’s a XXX for only $$$, and I just had to have it.”

We don’t have telescopes all over the place but we do have computer stuff. Stuff is an abstract word, but it refers to PCs (which I refer to as boxes), hard drives, computer cables, CAT-5 cables, boxes of hundreds of black cables all intertwined, boxes of cards – graphics cards, Network cards, USB cards – all green printed-circuit-board like and with silver this and that sticking out of them, as well as flat screen monitors I get at the Thrifty Shopper and store under the kids beds, and the list has only begun.

I tell her it’s all important and, when I get a PC from someplace – whether an old one from work, or one I find on the curb (yes, I have picked up a few off the curb) or at a garage sale or when my ever-so-kind relatives give me a trove – I usually cannibalize it. Cannibalize means that I rip out all the useful components, all the graphics cards and RAM (if not too old), and I can always use an extra hard drive and the sound cards sometimes come in handy etc. etc. etc.

So I have pieces everywhere, and I do try to organize them but there’s a lot, and who has the time?

So we live with it. Or I should say she lives with it.

I have redeemed myself. I had about twenty dead PCs on our old pool deck last spring, as well as five to seven old laptops and two or three printers, and when there was a Computer Recycling Drive in Weedsport last year, I loaded up my entire van – the entire thing, with just me in it – I mean my entire van, from floor to ceiling including the seats – and drove all these dead computer shells and wrecks that had sat out in the snow and rain for months under the menacing Central New York sky– I drove all these to the Computer Recycling Drive and parted with them forever.

Like mice that always seem to find a way back into the house, so did computer PCs and green PCI Express cards and monitors with only a scratch here and there and hard drives galore plus all the cables for everything – you know, computer stuff – and now the old pool deck has another stack of old, deceased, metal-cold and sometimes soaked hardware. So again it will be off to the recycling center this summer, and good riddance for many in my family.

But I’m a computer guy, and what do you expect? If you want sanity, marry a gardener or a manager of an IGA store or a boring accountant, or something. Don’t marry a computer guy. I often say that my kids are smart enough not to follow in my steps. It is so. But I have followed what some refer to as a line-of-work, but I consider more of a mental illness. That is also so. All I can say is that I’ve given those dear ones I live with awesome internet and fast PCs and printers that print like a dream, and scanning capability when they need it and we can fax too, and I might mention no telescopes, and what more could they want?

What Cancer has Wrought

Sometimes you just have to chuckle at all the interesting things that life can bring.

I’m speaking here of jobs, and there’s a story to tell, and it’s a bit involved. Growing up I was strongly encouraged to go to college, and I did so; a good idea these days as well as back then, because on this Earth you have to make living or you end up working at Walmart or the Rescue Mission. So, when I made my career choice – and with no experience doing much in this world in terms of work – I picked Magazine Journalism and ended up going to one of the best colleges for journalism in the country: Syracuse University. I wanted to be a great writer, and this was a road to that destination.

It turned out that I never became a great writer but ended up writing this little blog, so that is that, but I really like writing this blog, so all is well. And I had to give up being a great writer to follow Jesus, and to be a great writer I would have had to move to New York City, and who really wants to do that!

But then life happened and I got married and thought that maybe I should have a career where I could make some money; by that time I had worked with computers for a few years at General Electric and thought this would be a good career choice, so I went back to school upon marriage and got a second degree in Computer Science from SUNY Oswego. We only had one kid and we didn’t starve too much for the year and a half when I was in school, and I came out with my second bachelor’s degree.

This degree was a doorway to a good job, but even here I had to humble myself, as I took a job as a computer operator for $9/hour at a major hospital in Syracuse. A computer operator is the lowest of the low computer jobs but it was a job, and I was glad to be working again. Still, management saw that I could work, and being of German origin I could work my brains out and – oh – “You have a degree also” they learned, and up the ladder they moved me; up, up, up I went, and I became a programmer and a network engineer for several off-site departments of the hospital.

This was great but I realized that in Syracuse, NY, I could probably not replace this job if I lost it – the money was fairly good for Syracuse – and you have to understand that Syracuse is not he hotbed of hardly any economic activity, so I thought of getting into another field. I considered everything, from plumbing to becoming a X-Ray technician and was even accepted to Upstate’s medical program. That didn’t work out, and I somehow found a Health Systems Administration program at Rochester Institute of Technology and, yes, it was half price for some reason. God did that, I think.

We did this in 2005, and it took me about a year and a half; somewhere along the way, management saw that I was getting this neat degree and made me a manager of the support staff and IT department at the Dialysis program. I finished my degree in December, 2006, just in time to be diagnosed with cancer four months later. Some things don’t work out like you expect they would.

Then I began my cancer journey, as is chronicled abundantly in this little blog.  I was able to get a job four years later – and I spare you all the details of this – but I will say that it was a part time job working with the developmentally disabled: I would take them out into the community, go to stores with them, take them on walks so they could get exercise, and with one client, I would swing on the swings at Onondaga Lake Park. She liked to swing, so at 51 years of age I was swinging back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I like swinging. Life was good.

I happened to run into my old boss from the hospital in the mall and we both had a laugh: me, the great nerd, was now working in a people person job. Who would have thought!? Life has many twists and turns, and we agreed that this was definitely either a twist or a turn, depending on how you looked at it.

Events happened and I left that job to try my hand in small business, installing networks and fixing common computer problems at businesses in the area. I did this, and liked it but it really wasn’t steady work and, besides all this, I’m really not a great businessman. (All Stahls are great businessmen and make tons of money, but I apparently didn’t get this gene.) I then applied to another agency for the disabled in the area and almost immediately got a job working again with the developmentally disabled. We were back to a people person job. No matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to get away from working with people, the nerd that I am; try as I might.

It turned out through a confluence of events that I ended up as a job coach for a very young, friendly fellow who happens to work at a Rescue Mission trailer, accepting donations and then sorting the items and placing them in the right bins. I am there to help him with the various tasks that make up this job and to teach him the skills to keep it.

So, there you have it: we have a guy with three degrees who had a Masters in a very hot field – healthcare – and not only that: healthcare is one of the few fields that is growing in these early 21^st century years, and I am essentially working at the Rescue Mission. How perfect! How apt! Only God could have thought of that! In all the twists and turns that we could go through in life, it has to be probably one of the best, one of greatest amusements for God, his biggest chuckle regarding me, and only something that He could have thought of! It shows that God has a sense of humor; from the beginning of the world, when the foundations of it were laid, he saw I would be working at the Rescue Mission and said: “This is too perfect for a nerd like this.”

I agree. I like my little job, and with my cancer related fatigue, it’s perfect: not too little or too much, and I do it on the weekends so that helps with our cars situation. We have teenagers that need to be bused everywhere and new drivers, so the car thing is important. And it’s not so bad working with people, really; they’re not as cool as a new gadget or a new computer, but it rises to the level of at least interesting to me these days.

So this is what God has wrought, and he has used cancer to turn my life around 180 degrees. I could have made a lot of money in upper management at the hospital and really fed my family but perhaps I would have ended up miserable. Who knows; we always think the other direction our life could have gone would have been better but no: it could have been worse. Now I am relatively poor but have a lot of great kids and a great wife, and very, very good friends. And a few nickels here and there: what could be better?