“Once again, there is not quite enough money in the check
book for all the bills”, I thought as I wrote the checks and got them ready to
mail. “Will there ever be a day when
there will be enough?”, I remembered thinking…. It is 1980 and I was a young
mother home with two sons, Shawn is eight and Kyle is four. I would do everything I can to stretch our
money to make it be enough for the month but some months it just did not
work.
Gary worked for his father and uncle in the family
restaurant. I helped my dad out in his store when I could. Often in family businesses, family members
are treated differently than an employee who is not a family member. In
family businesses it can go either way, the family member employee is favored or it is
the quite the opposite. Sometimes so much more is
expected of the family member than an ordinary employee. You don’t just go do your job and then go
home….You have more riding on your job than most people realize. You find that
your dad telling you “what to do” all the time can be too much for a 20
something year old who is trying to make his way in the world! Sometimes the dad/ boss doesn’t know where to
draw the line which makes the adult son and father relationship strained at
best. This was the case with Gary and
his dad. I could not expect him to work
more he already worked 60 hours a week or more for his salary. The writing was on the wall, it was time for
me to get a job.
So Control Data Institute, here I come! It was quite a crazy the way to decided what
to do for a living but….Gary’s best friend, Ron Cross had gone to Control Data
and gotten a pretty good computer job. He kept encouraging me to look into it
every time I saw him. “ You can do this,
Jan!”, he would tell me, “go check it
out.” It was in the early days of
computers and there were quite a number of jobs available. He had gotten
employment in the Detroit area but eventually transferred to Salt Lake City,
Utah with a new company, called Storage Technology.
Ron kept telling me that I was smart enough to do his job and that it
would be good for a mother like me. “You
work when the equipment is broke.” He told me. The rest of the time you are not
working but you still get paid! Well,
that sounded pretty good to me so let the adventure begin!
I signed up at Control Data.
I took out school loans and before I knew it I was in class learning all
about computers. I got up at 4 AM to get
ready. I drove 75 mile one way to
Southfield, Michigan to begin class at 7:30 AM. Went to class from 7:30 to 1:00
PM and drove home to collect my kids from school and daycare and began my
afternoon studying. Most afternoons I
hoped that Kyle would nap, some days he did, some days he didn’t. I remember it seemed like I always had a
book in my hands and was studying something. No leisure reading for me for a
while, basic electricity, electronics, computer math, geometry, programing, all
courses I would need to learn how to be a computer technician. I was amazed to find out that Mr Swayzee did
teach me something in his Geometry class that I hated so much. It was the only class that I almost failed
and thought that I would never use anything he taught me! During my nine months at Control data not
only did I use the geometry, I actually was able to tutor some other
students.
I remember sitting at a table with a half a dozen adults,
studying and talking, when I had a mind blowing revelation! I really can have an intelligent adult
conversation. It seemed to me that it had been such a long time since I had
talked to anyone other than my children.
I had been in the vacuum of “motherhood” and was soon going to break out
of that mold.
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