A Day in the Life of a Senior Leader

Chapter 36. Crazy Charlie’s Window

Second year of UCSC. Decades ago. A predilection for Domino’s Pizza and a fundamental misunderstanding of how credit cards work left me in a financial hole. I needed a job, any job, and the Division of Social Sciences offered a job aligned with my computer science degree: lab technician.

A solid interview with a prompt job offer. “This is going to be easy.”

No, this was going to be boring.

The lab technician role was among the lowest rungs on the social science ladder. My boss was a tenured professor who was somehow protecting grant money by hiring a minimum-wage lab technician. Her description of the role during the interview had little intersection with what she described on my first day.

“Make sure the lab is tidy. Make sure the terminals work. And whatever else you want to do. You have a storage room where we store old terminals and other random hardware. You have an office. It used to be Crazy Charlie’s. It’s a mess.”

The lab was a large basement full of rectangular tables, each with two terminals on top. I never saw a human use the lab in my first two weeks on the job. The pre-PC terminals were heavy and ugly. A quick assessment revealed that 50% of them refused to turn on.

And that was the good news.

The storage room was long, perhaps 25 feet deep, with ceiling-high racks on both sides. These racks were jam-packed with discarded terminals, cardboard boxes full of who knows what, random bits and bobs of technology, and then just random ...