Over at Computerworld, Jeff Ello offers an interesting proposition – that the stereotypical IT person (antisocial, anti-management, anti-bureaucracy, etc) is merely a logical being who reacts in a logical way to their stereotypical environment. In particular, this quote caught my eye:

Antisocial behavior — It’s fair to say that there is a large contingent of IT pros who are socially unskilled. However, this doesn’t mean those IT pros are antisocial. On the whole, they have plenty to say. If you want to get your IT pros more involved, you should deal with the problems laid out above and then train your other staff how to deal with IT. Users need to be reminded a few things, including:

– IT wants to help me.
– I should keep an open mind.
– IT is not my personal tech adviser, nor is my work computer my personal computer.
– IT people have lives and other interests.

Like anyone else, IT people tend to socialize with people who respect them. They’ll stop going to the company picnic if it becomes an occasion for everyone to list all the computer problems they never bothered to mention before.

Without fail, not merely for myself but based on the experiences of friends/family I have known in IT, this is a major failing on the part of many organizations. IT people are “leaned on” constantly. They’re expected to fix their friends’ computers, neighbors’ computers, the computers of family members. Heck, they are sent questions by family/friends in other states who think that things can be fixed remotely. Co-workers piling on with this add to stress, especially if it’s done (a) often or (b) unappreciatively. Trust me when I say: we don’t mind, once in a while, helping someone out of a jam, especially if it’s something Worst Buy/Geek Squad/etc routinely screw up on or overcharge for. On the other hand, when we get 10+ requests for such help in a month, there’s a point where even we say “enough is enough.”

There’s another part as well:

Insubordination — This is a tricky one. Good IT pros are not anti-bureaucracy, as many observers think. They are anti-stupidity. The difference is both subjective and subtle. Good IT pros, whether they are expected to or not, have to operate and make decisions with little supervision. So when the rules are loose and logical and supervision is results-oriented, supportive and helpful to the process, IT pros are loyal, open, engaged and downright sociable. Arbitrary or micro-management, illogical decisions, inconsistent policies, the creation of unnecessary work and exclusionary practices will elicit a quiet, subversive, almost vicious attitude from otherwise excellent IT staff.

I’ve added the emphasis above for the basic point – people who go into IT, fundamentally, are (again) logical beings. They approach computers and technology, which are logical machines, in a logical fashion. They appreciate people like Will or Will’s normal working-environment types who, when they bring a problem up, bring the background research (error code, method to reproduce, etc) with it. They don’t appreciate Carol in accounts payable who sends in a request saying “this stupid thing doesn’t work come fix it while I go to lunch”, leaves no indication of what application is “not working”, leaves no recorded error code or method to reproduce the problem, and then has a screaming fit when she comes back to the office to find an email or note indicating that the IT staff would like her to inform them when she is available so that they can observe the problem and implement a solution.

IT people react quite well to Will-types, who we usually refer to by titles similar to “power users.” As far as IT goes, Will-types are collaborators; they respect us, we respect them, and when they ask for help, they’re willing to work with us to see that the solution is found and works well. Likewise, IT people react well to what I’ll refer to as “Joel”-types. Joels are people who know that computers are logical, have a little trouble grasping what they are doing, but are (a) patient about a response and (b) willing to be present and educated on what to do. Yes, we may have to answer the same question 2-3 times for a Joel in order for them to remember what they are doing, and occasionally they forget how to do something, but they recognize when their knowledge is insufficient and call for help rather than making things worse.

There are two other types we have to deal with. As I referred to a moment ago, there are the “Carol” types. Carols are the type who believe that somehow, with zero information and zero cooperation on their part, the magic box sitting on their desk can be made to do whatever they want to do. They believe that sending an email or help request along the lines of “this fucking thing isn’t working fix it” with an “available time” of ASAP and perhaps a threatening note about “reporting IT to the VP” if it isn’t done by the time they’re done with their noon “rendezvous” will somehow make it so that the fix “just happens.” Carol-types are also the type who insist their computer is “so slow” and “takes forever to log on”, but scream bloody murder if you want to remove the 10 different “IE Toolbar” apps, instant messaging apps, screwy spyware-laden screensavers, and other non-job-related miscellaneous widgets that they’ve put on their computer.

The final type I’ll refer to as the “Todd” type. Todd-types are the IT department’s nightmare. Todd-types, in fact, account for 99% of the aggravations that sparked my response to Farhad Manjoo’s column (hey, I warned you; we IT-types are anti-stupidity) earlier. The problem with Todd-types is that they are the portion of the world who overestimate their own competence. They believe (for example) that because they managed to plug in their DSL modem in at home and get their computer plugged in, they are competent to build and maintain a 500-machine network, or that because they managed to install “free” software package X at home, it should be used by everyone in the company (setting aside all questions of the legality, licensing, and security questions of doing so). Worse yet, when they encounter an issue, they don’t check in with us first. Instead, they flail around, delete this, rename that, alter this setting, alter that setting, and instead of coming in to implement a simple fix based on a known error code, we are then forced to work backwards through all the other things they messed up along the way. Todd-types are the type who jam in print cartridges without removing the packaging tabs or “rip-cord” tab first, damaging printers/copiers in the process. They try to remove a paper jam by hand the wrong way, turning a simple removal process into a 4-hour process of taking the printer half apart to get to the one scrap of paper still covering the jam sensor. They see an “error” and download a “driver search” package infested with malicious software. In short, Todd-types are the reason that many companies lock down computers and take “admin” (software installation) permissions away from most users in the first place.

Now, looking back above, what’s the difference between the Will/Joel and the Carol/Todd types? I’ll take them in sequence.

– IT wants to help me. Both the Will-types and the Joel-types recognize that IT wants to help them. IT wants them to be able to do their jobs well. When Will-types feel that IT is taking things away, it’s probably helpful to remind the Will-types that for every Will in an organization, there’s probably an even dozen Carol/Todds, and upper managment freaks out when they see “problems” like that (for example, when “Carol” screams bloody murder and IT’s only defense is to give the now-screaming VP a list of all the extraneous crap loaded to Carol’s computer or else see themselves subjected to the VP’s wrath).

– I should keep an open mind. Again, Will-types and Joel-types do this. When IT tells Will that they may not be able to be there instantaneously, or that they may need to do some research on a fix, Will knows they’re right – hell, he’s already been researching it himself. When IT tells the Joel-types that they would like to schedule ~30 minutes (5 to fix it, 25 to train Joel to better use the application), he gets it. Meanwhile, the Todd-types lie about their thrashing (lest IT twig them for what they did and start proceedings to restrict their access to prevent future damage) and then complain that IT didn’t “completely fix” their issue, and the Carol-types are just downright uncooperative from the start.

And, of course… the Carol and Todd-types are also the most likely reason your IT guys don’t go to the company picnic.

I periodically google to see if I can find any Lost watch parties in either Soundview (where I live) or Enterprise City (where I work). You know, a bar or restaurant or something that’s doing a showing. Sort of like the theater in Estacado.

No luck so far, but bizarrely, by putting in key words such as lost watch party enterprise city, the third link down was a posting on Monster.com that is, judging by the rather specific description, for a software testing position on the team that I’m working on.

What are the odds of that?

-{The following was written a couple months ago and apparently fell through the cracks}-

The commute terrors continue. On Thursday my morning drive to work alone took three for no discernible reason. I have discovered that if I leave early enough I can sidestep that. “Early enough” can be defined as sometime between 5am (wherein there was no traffic) and 7am (wherein there is much). I’ve been pondering whether or not to start going in to get there at 7, spending two hours in the cafeteria novel-writing, and then working from 9-6. I’ve also determined that since Friday morning traffic is not generally as bad, if I were to come in early on Mondays and work a couple extra hours and come in late every Thursday I could keep the horrendous traffic down to two days a week (and inconsistent Fridays).

One thing that I have not really considered is public transportation.

The main reason for that is that there is no direct route from Soundview, where I live, to Enterprise City, where I work. In order to take the bus, I’d have to drive to a Soundview Park’n’Ride, take a bus to Zaulem, then hop buses to Enterprise. On a good day, that alone would take me two hours. It’s not hard to imagine days where I miss the connect and it takes considerably longer. The upshot would be that I could spend my time doing something other than driving. But that’s about the only upshot and right now audiobooks are keeping me somewhat entertained.

Historically, I would love to take public transportation to work. When I had jury duty in Colosse I had a bus pass and it was awesome. I drove to the PnR in Mayne, got on the bus, and got off near the County Courthouse. To anyone that lives in the suburbs and works in downtown, it’s absolutely great. What a lot of boosters of public transportation don’t realize, though, is that that’s actually only rarely the case. Newer cities are not generally built cleanly around the downtown/suburb model that many people imagine and may see in their own Historic cities. Had they been built around public transportation from the outset, public transportation would likely make a lot more sense for a lot more people and it’s quite likely that we would all be better off. Even with that admission, though, the facts on the ground don’t particularly support public transportation in most cities. The main reason being is that only a fraction of a city’s workforce typically works downtown except in very few metropolitan hubs. Instead you see more things like my current situation where you’re driving from one part of a metro area to another and everybody is driving too and from separate parts.

I frankly have difficulty seeing a more robust public transportation changing that. The industrial parks have already been built. Housing patterns have already been established. It’s possible that in rapidly growing smaller cities like Boise or Reno that they could make a dent, but not in cities that have downtown areas that are simply too small to support the bulk of the city’s workforce. Colosse has an economically robust downtown area in the daytime, and maybe if the incentives were in place more taller skyscrapers would be built, but never enough to keep up, really. You could set up alternate downtowns and the Colosse has done just that, but not enough to justify direct public transportation in many case and the only places for further growth are in the suburbs, which makes it so that public transportation is only supportable from that half or quadrant of the city.

On the other hand, if the goal is to get more cars off the road, it does seem to me that there are cases such as Soundview to New City to Enterprise might be a good idea even if not economically profitable. That’s certainly a case where a not-insignificant number of people would likely take advantage. I think that the biggest problem at the moment is that any such bus route would involve the same Splinterstate that I deal with day in and day out where the HOV lane often gets just as backed up as everything else and for it to work you would need constant back-and-forth which is probably not supportable by the current commuting population. What Cascadia (in concert with my employer, Mindstorm) has instead done is double-down on Vanpooling.

The basic idea behind Vanpooling is that if you can get enough people, the Cascadia Metropolitan Transit Authority (CMTA) will spot you the vehicle and Mindstorm will give you primo parking. I’ve thought about going this route, but the problem with that arrangement is that you lack flexibility. You have to all go and leave at the same time, and in a dynamic work environment like Mindstorm and really most every job I’ve ever held, that’s not realistic. You don’t always know when you leave in the morning what time you’re leaving for home at night. With regular bus service this isn’t a problem because you can just take the next bus, but when you’ve only got one ride home that’s a problem.

What I guess would be ideal would be some sort of system where enough people could pool in together in order to have one bus arrive at 8, one at 9, and one at 10 and then leave at 5, 6, and 7 respectively. That’s a lot of cats to herd.

I have a higher-quality copy of this video on my computer. When I have difficulty getting up in the morning, I actually play this video and it seems to actually help get me moving. I guess it’s no big surprise that a video about trying to make it to the freedom that comes at the end of the day helps me face the prospect of going to work!

Will posits the trouble of being middle management, beholden to company superiors and policy and yet also expected to interface with lower level employees and try to work out their concerns to keep the office running smoothly.

The contents of this post also tangentially relate to the Department I Don’t Work For.

I’m in a semi-middle management (in that I can reassign work to “level 1” and that more and more of my job responsibility is not taking care of every little thing myself, but seeing that whoever I assigned it to gets it done while I work on the Big Things) role now, and moving up shortly to what I will consider a fully middle-management position. My responsibilities have changed from “grunt work” to the occasional small thing (when we’re short staffed) with the rest of my time occupied by keeping abreast of policy issues, changes being done from above, and the ongoing changes in technology so that when people under my pay grade get confused, I can give them the info/training necessary to get their jobs done.

Part of this role, given that it’s at Southern Tech University, involves interfacing with the various faculty/staff and trying to meet their “needs” (or desires) while staying within policy. Only, since it is a government institution, we have the following policies we have to keep abreast of:
– Federal regulations (safety, security, privacy)
– State regulations (safety, security, privacy, information retention)
– Systemwide regulations
– College-level regulations
– Our own department mandate (we have a very specific charter on what we are allowed to spend money on, tied directly to the fact that it has to be either for student use or for educational in-classroom use, and other departments are always trying to find “loopholes” to get into our money).

Where this gets even hairier is that we are in the unenviable position of trying to enforce these regulations on tenured faculty. The thing to remember about tenured faculty is that they are (a) at least 80% completely technologically inept and (b) used to constantly getting their way from students and grad assistants, and even from the College itself if they happen to bring in a particularly large grant and can threaten to take it to another institution.

For many of our discussions, we are (for better or worse) stuck in between a fast-moving object (the faculty) and an immovable object (the various regulations). Faculty that are used to getting the rules ‘bent’ for them on things like the spending of grant money or the deadlines for various applications come to us wanting things changed “just for them.” Things like password reset deadlines or complexity requirements, alterations to the email server so that their Blackberry can function (Blackberry’s server-side software, alas, tries to auto-install a rather insecure MS-SQL setup and eats up a ton of resources), or more unusual requests that often involve a fundamental inability of the faculty member to understand the limitations of technology. Quite often, we are stuck in a situation where we are the bearer of bad news (“I’m sorry, but what you are asking for cannot be done under Regulation X.Y.Z”) or else we are caught between someone asking for something and forced to tell them no on the grounds that (a) it is technologically impossible, (b) it is cost-prohibitive, or (c) it would require the purchase of X and it does not fit within our purview to make that purchase for the intended use.

Some days, they even come back and try to make threats and trouble with us for bringing the response back about regulations.

I doubt most middle-management deals with that; I imagine that most of the time “or I quit” is about the extent of the major threat, unless employees have access to sensitive information or their loss would seriously impact a project in some way. I don’t know that it the IT-side question 100% matches the “middle management” question, but it is always interesting (and sometimes quite frustrating) being the go-between.

What do Office Space, The Office, The IT Crowd, and Dilbert have in common? Well, obviously they’re all office-based comedies of some sort or another, but they share something else in common: In all four productions, they are told with a perspective most sympathetic to the grunt and least sympathetic to management. Only The Office serials break this mold at least a little where upper management (Neil in UK, Wallace in US) is just as exasperated by the middle managers as the underlings are. But in all of the cases, the problem is depicted as being with management getting in the way, distracting, harassing, or otherwise denigrating the protagonist grunts.

It seems to me that some comic opportunity is really being missed here.

When I was working for Falstaff in Deseret and early on in my tenure at Monmark, I used to produce a comic strip. No one at Monmark ever knew about it, but it gave me a tidbit of celebrity cred when I was working at Falstaff. I won’t reproduce any of it here, but if anyone is interested I can send you a link to my archives. The somewhat unique thing about the strip, though, is that it is primarily told from the point of view of the middle manager. The character, Gil, was based off of my former boss (and current HC commenter) Willard. Gil was essentially stuck between an exceptionally obtuse corporate managerial structure and at least a couple lazy employees. That’s not to say that Gil is without his quirks and double-dealing, but a lot of it is in response to the pressures he’s under. Management dictates on one hand, common sense on the other or the need to be a tactful supervisor and employees that could care less). By and large it’s more critical of management than of the employees (who are themselves often sympathetic), but I focus on the trials of Gil somewhat because it’s a point of view that is often missing from office comedy.

It’s not entirely missing. It’s often the case where the main character has an underling or two that are quirky, lazy, or somehow agitating. But it’s usually just their personal secretary or something of the like. And most of the time, it’s the “office” part of a comedy that primarily focuses on the main character’s family life or the office is itself an atypical one. An example of this would be News Radio, where the station manager is the straight man with a wacky corporate owner (Stephen Root’s Jimmy James is one of the cooolest characters on television ever) and a bunch of oddball employees (Phil Hartman and Andy Dick being the primary examples). Murphy Brown also followed this mold. But it seems that any show that focuses primarily or substantially on the office and where the office is intentionally generic so that the viewer can relate to it, it’s Grunt vs Management and we’re obviously supposed to side with the grunt.

I guess it’s part of the egalitarianism of the US that this is the way that it’s supposed to be. We supposedly like siding with the little guy. Even middle managers are generally more cogniscent of the pressures from above than the pressures from below and so maybe they’re more likely to laugh at the managers than the employees. Hard to say for sure. In any case, it makes me want to make a show from the manager’s point of view.

I made a decision about this blog of utterly minimal consequence, which is actually the reversal of a decision that I don’t think that anyone actually noticed. But it’s related to the history of my online nickname, so I’ll share a bit about that.

All of you have probably figured out that “Trumwill” is the first four letters of my last name followed by the first four letters of my first name. The name was derived from the account naming convention of a former employer wherein they did the same. The formulized account name became so prevalent in everything we did and the office environment itself was so cold and impersonalized that when it was pronounceable we called each other by our account names rather than our real names.

When I started this blog, a lot of it involved talking about work. The email addresses and account names at Falstaff, where I was working at the time were our first name followed by our last initial. Most of the accounts I’ve had were my first initial followed by my last name. Sometimes my first two initials. Once it was like “Trumwill” except it went 6-2 rather than 4-4. I was initially going to go with WillT (and I do use that sometimes), but I came to the odd decision that if someone from my work saw that naming convention it might be familiar or something, so I explored alternatives. wtruman and trumanwi were both lame, but trumwill was perfectly pronounceable and even if no one knew precisely where it came from it was indicative to me of corporate absurdity in a blog about (at the time) corporate absurdity. So “trumwill” it was.

So that brings me to the current decision. At the former employer, our account names were never capitalized. So for this blog, I almost never capitalized my name. Everyone else did, but I didn’t. Even in blog post titles. The idea in my mind was that it harkened back to the former job with the former company. I’ve since come to the conclusion that it is more easily interpreted as lame like a black-clad teenager that things that never capitalizing anything or capitalizing sporadically is kewl like ee cummings or some crap like that.

So despite its origins (which are largely irrelevant and will be made moreso as it’s unlikely that I will get into the grit of my current work since it’s all so bloody obvious who it’s with), Trumwill is now officially capitalized.

Different jobs take up different percentages of your brainpower. A job that takes 100% of it 100% of the time will tend to burn you out pretty quickly, even if you only work 40 hours a week. A job that takes 10% of it 90% of the time are often too boring to survive unless you can find something to do with the remaining 90% of your brainpower. I typically define something taking 80% of your brainpower if you can’t talk to anyone else or listen to anything while your working because it will prove too distracting. In the 60-80% range you can listen to music, but anything with words might mess you up. In the 30-60% range you can listen to music while you do it though you don’t necessarily need to be doing something else (though at lower levels it helps). In the 0-30% range, you need something else to keep your mind occupied while you work and you can even be doing more contemplative things while you work like thinking about world events, watching television, or talking to a coworker.

My current job only requires 5-20% of my thoughts 70% of the time. This would be miserable, except that they let me listen to things while I work. They let me do the same in Deseret, where it was 20-40% of my brainpower 95% of the time. In both cases, keeping the rest of my mind occupied helps keep me on task because it prevents me from doing something that takes too much attention away from my work, such as surfing the Internet.

This past year or so has really worked out very nicely for me, given the givens. I don’t like my job all that much and don’t get much in the way of personal satisfaction through it, but it gives me room to do things that make my day a lot more entertaining than it might be if I was at a job that required more of my brain. A year or so ago I bought a Pocket PC as a stand-in for an iPod solely so that I could listen to stuff while I worked. I started with music, but before long I figured out that I could listen to television shows and podcasts of the audio and video varieties.

It has turned into a marvelous investment. So much so that when it broke, I had no problem justifying the purchase of another. Not only do I get to listen while I’m at work, but I can also listen while I clean up around the apartment, while I’m going shopping, and while I’m doing anything that doesn’t require all that much of my attention. It makes a lot of boring stretches in my day go by faster and it allows me to “watch” television shows that I’d otherwise never get to see (or at least wouldn’t get to see starting at the beginning all the way to the ending).

You might be surprised how many television shows you can just listen to. Most sitcoms are listenable unless they’re gag-oriented. Most humor is in dialogue and even when there is something funny that’s not dialogue, you can picture in your mind what’s going on. Dramas are a bit more spotty, particularly if there’s a lot going on. The Sopranos, for instance, is far too visual, as is science fiction like Battlestar Gallactica. Thus far I have only had to abandon two shows due to it being excessively visual. About halfway through the first season I stopped listening to Las Vegas. When I don’t have anything else to listen to I’ll give it a shot, but about half of the episodes there are stretches where I really don’t know what’s going on. the same is true for Third Rock From The Sun, which is more visual than I would have thought. I can follow the plot, but I’m missing out on more of the humor.

I know that I’m missing stuff on other shows, too. The toughest one that I’ve gotten through was Homicide, Life on the Street. I managed to get through it, but sometimes I’d realize about halfway through that someone had died or I’d missed some big event. Nonetheless, it’s surprising how my mind is able to put a lot of it together. Music helps a lot. I can never see characters kissing, for instance, but I can often tell by the music alone.

Every now and again there will be some episode that I will have to skip. This happens particularly in sitcoms. There was an episode of Frasier where no one spoke for the first twelve minutes, an episode of Two Guys and a Girl where no one spoke at all, a couple episodes of How I Met Your Mother where subtitles are used extensively, and an episode of The Drew Carey Show where the characters are speaking gibberish and what they mean is on display on comic-style bubbles. There are also various points at which something other than English is being spoken, though most of the time you can figure out what’s going on regardless.

Sometimes I feel bad knowing that I’m missing some visual gags or there’s something going on in the episode that I am missing, but for the most part it’s unlikely that I would get the opportunity to watch these shows all the way through if I didn’t do it this way. It’s better to catch 90% of a show than miss out on it entirely. Sometimes after listening to an important episode, I’ll go home and watch it.

Below is a list of all of the shows that I’ve listened to more-or-less in the order that I’ve listened to them in. Sometimes I’ll have two shows going on in parallel because I’ll want to switch to a comedy because I’m having a depressing day but once I am in a better mood I want to go back to a more gripping drama. Also, when about to finish one show, I’ll frequently start another show before the last season so that when I finish the first show, I’m already entrenched in the second show. For instance, I started listening to Just Shoot Me prior to watching the last season of The West Wing.

NewsRadio (All 5 seasons)
Frasier (All 11 seasons)
Cheers (Half of first season)
SportsNight (Both seasons)
The West Wing (All 7 seasons)
Just Shoot Me (All 7 seasons)
Profit (All 9 episodes)
Two Guys and a Girl (All 4 seasons)
Friends (All 10 seasons)
Seinfeld (First 3 seasons)
The Practice (All 8 seasons)
Boston Legal (Up to current)
Ally McBeal (Seasons 1-4*)
Las Vegas (First seventeen episodes)
Homicide, Life on the Street (Seasons 3-7*)
Felicity (Two episodes)
Brothers & Sisters (One episode)
Third Rock From The Sun (Much of first two seasons)
The Drew Carey Show (Up to Season 6)
Spin City (Still in Season 1)

* – I watched the first two seasons of Homicide on the exercise bike before switching to listening to it at work. I had to watch the fifth and final season of Ally McBeal because they were in a format that wouldn’t play on my Pocket PC.

My mother married for the first time in Carolina. Her husband was a classmate at Carolina State University studying to be an aeronautical engineer. As was not uncommonly the case, after they got married she quit her job and supported him through school.

Their marriage was a difficult one from the get-go because of her husband’s alcohol problems. When Mom proposed that they move to California, she talked of “new beginnings.” In fact, she wanted to get further away from her family because that would make leaving him a lot easier from a social standpoint.

They divorced. Mom regretted a lot about that marriage, but one of her biggest regrets was how he got out of it with a masters degree in engineering while she was still a lowly secretary. She had no real career ambitions and hated working, so it irked her all the more that she had to spend so much time clock-punching. Worse, because he was too much of a drunk to hold on to a job, couldn’t even get alimony out of the arrangement.

She met my father while they both worked for McClellan Forrester, a defense contractor. She said early on that if there was one thing that she would never do again, it was pay to send another husband through school. Dad was perfectly fine with that because he didn’t have any aspirations of going to graduate school.

Then California A&M University came calling. They were starting a new military economics major that was available only to folks with engineering degrees. Because he had experience in the defense industry, they would cut him slack and he could do something else (I don’t remember what) in lieu of a thesis. Dad was tired of working on fighter planes and was looking to get into administration and this was his golden opportunity.

He talked to McClellan-Forrester about their tuition reimbursement program. As luck would have it, they’d just discontinued it. Not only had they just discontinued it, they were asking employees to back-pay previous reimbursements that they’ve gotten. There was no legal way for McClellan-Forrester to do this, but all they had to do was lay out the threat of laying terminating their employment.

McClellan-Forrester was in a position of great power at the time. They were a defense contractor and their employees were exempt from the draft. Any employee that happened to lose their jobs that happened to be the right (or wrong, depending on how you look at it) age was likely not going to be unemployed in the United States for very long. The few coworkers that Dad knew that had tuition reimbursements were scrambling to find the money to give back to their employer in order to stay on their good side.

With hat in hand, Dad came home and explained the situation to Mom. he refused to ask her to support him through school, but it was pretty obvious what he was getting at. She agreed and because he was getting a degree in a military-related field, Dad remained exempt from the draft.

After Dad got his degree he got a job with the Department of Defense almost immediately. The DoD knew just as well as MF that they were in a position of power, so they only agreed to pay him as much as they would if he hadn’t gotten the extra degree. It was still worth going back to school, though, because at this point things were desperate enough that you needed a masters degree to get a bachelors degree job.

Mom was able to milk Dad’s guilt for years. As soon as he got his job with the government, she was able to quit work and be a full-time housewife in a house with no kids. The way she saw it, they both got a pretty sweet gig.