The Boring Part

I need to vent, and welcome any advice, on several matters which are somewhat entangled with each other.

Job

For eleven years I processed words for lawyers. Few are as efficient or as accurate as I am. So when my employer shut down in December, I thought, no problem: I’ll laze about the house until I’m sick of it, then make the rounds of the temp agencies and be back at work in no time. It didn’t work out that way. I’ve worked about three of the past seven months, and my reserve is gone. I asked my agents if there’s anything I can do to make myself more marketable; they all said “it’s not you, it’s the recession” — but ego-balm pays no bills. The dinosaurs didn’t get far by reminding themselves that Chicxulub was not their fault.

You may ask why such a towering intellect spends his life at such a dead-end trade. Once upon a time I worked as a programmer; but after getting laid off the second time (1987) I said to hell with it: I wasn’t having fun anyway; couldn’t see any path from what I was doing (embedded 8bit firmware) toward anything more interesting; couldn’t face another year of rejection. I type a hundred words a minute; I can live on that. So I gave away most of my neep-neep books (I called it my Great Renunciation) and settled down to be the best damn menial office-worker you ever saw. The dollars/stress ratio, particularly in my last job, was quite favorable.

But in recent years I’ve been increasingly fidgety. I want to do something that I, at least, find interesting enough to talk about; something that won’t be obsolete in ten years. Independent of that, I’d prefer to work for a business that has real customers and a sense of progress – but nobody other than lawyers pays typists so well.

What to do? One of my old stumbling-blocks has faded: unlike 1987 I now have social contacts who might be useful (if I could get back into programming at all after fifteen years), and better understanding of what they talk about at Sili Valley parties. But I’m almost phobic about talking to strangers, and nervous about any job advertised with words like ‘creative’ or ‘challenge’.

Computer

I was long a Mac fan, but in 1999 I was becoming frustrated: with version 8, MacOS had become arcane enough that I no longer felt in charge. So when I read “In the Beginning was the Command Line”, I was hooked: with that year’s bonus I’d buy a generic PC and install Linux. Only. (I was already familiar with Unix shell.) I’d be able to write C programs without the Mac UI straitjacket (I just wanted to read a text file and write a text file; is that so much to ask?) and as a free bonus acquire *nix sysop skilz, a gateway to unimaginable opportunity.

Not quite. I quickly got discouraged on finding that the famous Linux documentation is useless to the uninitiated; to do anything nontrivial (i.e. for which the shell command isn’t in the pocket reference) you need to find at least three different books. I still have no idea how to change the time-zone, short of reinstalling.

Of the several Linux distributions I’ve tried, only Red Hat sets up X properly. This may be because I bought an Athlon rather than a Pentium; maybe there was a slight price advantage but mainly I couldn’t resist the temptation to be a rebel in that apparently harmless way.

Health

In 1994 I took Paxil, whose effects were dramatic but did not last. I stopped when the benefit no longer outweighed the diarrhea. In 1996 I took Prozac, which kept the worst of the demons away for three years – during which I gained seventy pounds. (My appetite has recently returned to its previous level, so maybe I’ll now start to lose.) Other antidepressants have come on market since then; are there any that give long-term relief without such tiresome side-effects? I can’t afford to gain any more weight.