The Compulsive Explainer

This was me during the first twenty years of my working life. When I went to college, I first intended to become a scientist of some kind—science was important back then. But I found I could not hack it as a scientist, and transferred to Engineering school instead. Contrary to what most of my fellow students thought, Engineering was not a hard subject—you just had to plod along learning basic stuff: like how to use a slide rule. Hardly anything I learned was any use to me later when I got a job as an engineer.

When looking for a job I made sure I wouldn’t have to work in a office. I was so socially mal-adjusted I would have freaked out in one—as my ex did later when she tried an office job. I even freaked out visiting a supermarket: all those products neatly laid out on all those shelves!. I was paranoid.

So I got a job with the Federal Aviation Agency as a field engineer, installing and modifying navigation, communication, and radar facilities. I traveled from job to job being a high-paid electrician, actually. But I didn’t have to mess much with people. I made so much money I didn’t bother to cash all my pay checks. This resulted in some stern letters from the pay office “Please cash you pay checks, you are messing up our accounting.”

I then tried working for the Army at their research facility in Ft. Belvoir, VA. I was really looking forward to doing some research. Transistors were becoming common and revolutionizing electronics. It was a terrible experience. The lab wasn’t doing research, it was simply spending money on stupid contracts. The engineers were the worst idiots I ever worked with—except perhaps the Navy.

The Cold War was now going full blast, and needed all the pseudo-engineers it could get. I spent the next six years working for the Navy, the Army again, and then the Air Force at Vandenberg, watching missiles fire off. (Beth, my wife, had wanted to move to California.)

Then she started to develop schizophrenia. We stopped working and moved to a perfect spot on the San Luis Obispo coast. I loved it, but she broke out in a nervous rash and started seeing a therapist, one of many. The upshot was that two years later, after a total breakdown, she left me. I went back to work with the FAA in Denver, in a desk job.

I got fed up with that, decided to have my mid-life crisis (they were common then), quit my job and traveled and backpacked for six years. When I ran out of money I became a programmer (software was just becoming hot). When I found I wasn’t really that interested in programming, I became a tech writer—and worked at that for the next twenty years.

Now you have the story of my life.