A long, long time ago, I was a computer operator. I started at Bell Telephone here in Springfield, Illinois. I’m not sure posterity will be at all interested in the beginnings of this industry, but if they are, I can contribute some. When I first entered the industry, all data to be processed first had to be keyed
( with all due respect, I could only find this image with a male at this keypunch machine, but by far and away, the vast army of keyers were female.) into punch cards
which were then fed into our peripheral equipment which had to be programmed for each job you ran. We IBM operators did that with a board,
whose description is difficult as there are few modern analogies to draw from. If you can remember the old-fashioned telephone switchboards that you sometimes see in old movies, this would be a smaller version of that. It was about 16” by 16”, completely filled with holes into which wires were plugged. Then the board itself was plugged into the data machine which now had the proper instructions to run your job. The following illustration is a Sorter:
.
Eventually, all that data, now processed into ‘information’ units went to the computer which could process it according to a business’ needs and spit out reports, or generate altered data sets that other programs could use.
But what I really wanted to show you was the original computing set:
A room full of comptometer (a word not in WORD dictionary) operators. Multiply this picture by the thousands all across America, search diligently and my mother is in there somewhere, at least for a little while. She was easily bored, but she performed as a comptometer operator for a few years anyway before my father and for some after, but the whorld was changing by then, as had she. And this is the calculating keyboard.
Nothing quite like the sight and sound of a hundred hands fast-stroking this board, computing all the facts and figures for a business’ needs prior to the computer revolution. You can’t imagine how fast their hands worked. I would love to show you that or show you how these machines operated but such a task is too time costly and of no worth today. There may be info on Google should you care. The comptometers really weren’t like a calculator though, and in fact bested a calculator if the only operation was addition.
My point in all this was to indicate how little the apple fell from the tree as I became my mother’s office replacement unwittingly for sure, it just happened that way as I fell into computers. She never forgave me. Only half kidding about that.
I rarely saw her office self, having come too late to the party, for she had ceased to work in offices after she found my ‘wonderful’ father, who insisted she not. So only once, for a little while and I will try to recount that time, though it pains me greatly. As an important aside, it involves racism. For those of you who think only whites are racists, that other races are somehow by virtue of a nonsensically perceived innocence long erroneously touted as the ‘noble savage’ concept, are free from racism, well, you are, how should I put this , , , oh, yeah: fucking bat shit crazy! It’s only because you perceive these ‘qualities” from your eyrie rather than down here on the ground with those of us who actually live with other races. I have experienced racism in many forms on enough occasions. It ranges from the sycophant to the hate-filled looks. Although I had hoped the ‘noble savage’ concept was by now, discounted, it appears from all the furor by Antifa, who are the very essence of fascism, that it is not only not discounted but elevated and revered. My education both in and out of school has taught me that humans did not fight their way up out of the primordial ooze by eschewing blood, and tooth and fang and claw and hatred. Genes express and want to naught else but express and that excludes those NOT carrying the gene that would express. It’s the way of the world and not just a fault of the white race. Many students today believe quite the opposite, something like white people sprang from the devil’s asshole, while all other races were god’s gift to earth. Okey-dokey.
Be all that as it may, when I left my mother in Springfield and moved to California, she began drinking for real and managed to snag cirrhosis, ending up in the hospital. My poor mother was haunted and pained so much by life, by demons I knew nor know nothing of nor could I have helped her had I even known. So I cry as I type this, because it saddens me enormously. When I learned she was hospitalized I brought her to live with me, recorded elsewhere. After she got some strength back, my employer gladly employed her, as the experienced comptometer operator that she was. Her gang worked right next door to my computer room, and we sometimes met for lunch or briefly if work called for it. As I try to recall it now, it seems, as so much in my life, life’s attempt to create a place where healing could occur. What could be better than she and I working at the same business, each in our specialties, right next door to each other giving us a chance to get to know one another separate from the intimacy of home. Well, it didn’t work out. I don’t recall all the particulars. Perhaps I was always too busy, having been promoted to manager of computer operations and I guess she thought me full of myself and perhaps I was. For her, she had landed in an Asian nation, as the comptometer room was full of Asian women it being San Francisco after all. And when I entered her space, I could feel the hate rolling off them to the lone white woman, my mother, in their midst. Some irony here as one of the women in another adjacent office, young girl, really, who loved me most at work during this time was little Grace Chang, who said no one else would take the time to teach her as I did routinely. Something I would have done for any ethnicity, why not?! I’ve learned a lot since then, mainly how much other races hate us and wonder at my innocence. At any rate, my mother’s and my office interactions were few and far between.
Nor were we getting along at home much more than we ever had. To her and cirrhosis credit, she was no longer drinking and we did have a few nights of relative normalcy. The apartment’s large picture window faced Folsom St. and we watched the prostitutes working our corner every night. Don’t judge us, the girls weren’t the problem so much as watching their slickass pimps drop them off and then the coming and going of the johns. It was seedy and dangerous and where I was one night faced with a gun-toting thug wanting ‘my money and my cigarettes.” Or for another instance, one evening as she and I walked to the corner store, a black man passed us going the opposite direction and asked, “Who’s the man?” assuming us to be lesbians. My gayness discomforted her and I can’t blame her. It didn’t exactly comfort me either. Possibly hastened by our neighborhood, black and uncomfortable, she eventually found herself a man, got married, terrible decision, but pattern of her life. More than that occurred; other pain-laden vignettes and I think we were only there two months! Sadly, my mother and I were just not meant to be. And then I found a girlfriend and moved out too.
I would hate for you to witness the state just keying this little bit of hell has caused me. In sum: I wept and snorted, tried to escape and went to the store in this 10 degree weather still wrestling with my feelings about how awful i have always felt, never having done enough for my mother and thinking, “I have asked and asked, and ASKED for an answer to how things went so wrong, how could I have done better all to no avail no answer” when suddenly my attention was drawn to the license plate in front of me and it reminded me of a poem I had already written titled: A Short Poem on the Event of Discovering a Disaster about Which I Can Do Nothing, to wit: “Oh no!Oh yes!Oh SHIT!Oh well.” Why, yes, thank you, it IS a perfectly nice poem, and the license plate I saw was OH WELL #. I musn’t give the number but it rhymes with heaven and thank you very much, you unwitting helper of my mood. I shall set myself to meditate on oh well.
My quasi-resolution may seem trite, or tripe, but I have dealt with this so long, perhaps now I can move on to other problems, like just now it occurs to me, “why does have end in 'e'? Why isn’t have spelled 'hav'? I’ll try to get back to you on that.
(Illustration Sites provided upon request)
(Illustration Sites provided upon request)
