Previously on CMcL, I shared a handful of kooky conversations that took place several years ago with a certain BossLady of mine. (One, two, three, four, five.) Eventually I realized that these anecdotes weren’t really suited to my little photocomic format, and promised to publish a more complete record of BossLady’s wacky antics. Starting today, and hopefully every Sunday, I will share a little something from the journals I kept during my career as BossLady’s assistant.
Disclaimer: This all happened several years ago, but I’m preserving the entries as they were written, in the present tense. I’ve never shown these in public before, but I did write them with a prescient knowledge that someday I’d share them. Also, some of the stuff I wrote back then was admittedly obnoxious. I like to think I’d be a little kinder and more patient with people like BossLady today than I was then, but Lord help me, she’d try the patience of an alligator.
So, in the grand tradition of all great literature, I shall begin at the beginning and go on till I come to the end; then stop.
Once upon a time, I applied for a job at a real estate office. I was applying for an assistant position, and I interviewed with the two Realtors who needed help, BossMan and BossLady. BossMan was the one who was all about real estate; he actually made all the deals and talked to all the clients. BossLady was the one who was a “techie.” She had her real estate license, but she was in charge of the website, the mailers, and everything involving the computers. When I interviewed, she talked up her own skills with Web design and her past jobs, one with a famous hardware company, and her career as a database administrator. Basically, she handled the marketing and technical aspects of the business, and he handled the listings and the sales. As a blossoming geek myself, I thought, “This’ll be great, she’s trained in technology, I’ll be able to learn a lot from this woman.”
So I got the job, and I was good at it. They started giving me more responsibilities, and she and I started having conversations about “techie” matters. It turned out that a lot of stuff that I knew about (PHP, MySQL, CSS, that sort of thing) was outside her realm of experience. Apparently, most of what she did know consisted of how to get printers and cartridges really cheap online, and how to download obscure pieces of free software. I thought it was a little odd, but not everyone knows everything, so I didn’t worry about it at first. But at one point, she went out of her way to say this to me:
“I almost have a Master’s Degree in Computer Science!”
Remember that; it’ll be important in every one of these stories.
For the record, I myself have no degrees. To date, I have had exactly two semesters of college, and neither of them included any computer courses. Everything I know, I learned on the job or on my own, from books and online tutorials. This is both a point of pride and a point of frustration for me; the only reasons I have for not taking more college courses have been (1) lack of funds, and/or (2) lack of time.
Also for the record: I really enjoy my job. BossMan and BossLady treat me very well; and they are, at this point, essentially paying me to do what I consider to be a hobby. I like them both, but there are days…Well, read on.