It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part LI

It was Monday, July 27, 1987. 

The storm had overshadowed one big bit of news; I’d landed some freelance work, writing a manual for some software for a company in Edina.  It was going to be a month or so worth of work.  The best part?  It was going to be a princely $12.50 an hour!.  Other than the odd voiceover job, I’d never gotten more than $8/hour in my life, for anything.

It was a long commute, made doubly galling by the fact that I’d moved to Saint Paul just in time to get whacked at KSTP, from a place that was probably a 20-25 minute drive from this gig. 

The work was interesting – and utterly unlike anything I’d done before.  For starters, I was writing on a computer.  Not one of the DEC PDP 11/44s I’d used in college, for everything from programming (I’d completed most of a Computer Science minor, before I decided that I hated it) to writing term papers (we used the roff and nroff text-formatting programs to print “pretty” documents on an NEC Spinwriter teletype terminal, at a stately one page per minute) – but the company sat me down behind a Mac.  It was the first computer I’d touched in a long time, and the first time I’d seen a Graphical User Interface other than, say, in the movies.

The commute was gruelling.  It was blazingly hot, and with all the water soaking the region, it was one of the two most humid periods of time I can remember in my life.

But I looked forward to a paycheck that’d cover more than bare subsistence for the first time in quite a while. 

And that felt good.

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