#interesting work

It's the after the morbid part it does get pretty hilarious.

The other night, I had a dream. It was a dream based on reality. In the dream, I was supposed to do a podcast about me, but I couldn’t find anything interesting to say. I thought about recording my book, but there’s an awful lot in my book I need to change, big sections that need rewriting plus many areas where I have changed my mind and feel the book is misleading. I can’t view it as “just…

Garry and I had interesting careers. To some degree, the work we did made a difference, though how much difference is still a point of discussion. Garry covered news. Trials, murders, fatal accidents, crime, politics, celebrities, opening days at Fenway, following Presidents and other VIPs. Garry’s professional life put him in the spotlight. He was regionally well-known and a daily presence on…

Garry’s work was notorious. Regionally famous, though surprisingly many people who didn’t live locally had seen his stories on the networks or on foreign new services. Garry was a daily presence on local television and frequently nationally too. People might forget which station he worked for, but they knew his face and felt like he was part of the family. After all, he showed up every night just about supper time.

Garry is a great speaker when he has an audience, He can weave a tale from almost any experience and people love listening to him. Usually he tells the truth, which is often more bizarre than anything he could create.  Now and again (since I know all his stories by now, I realize he’s doing a little expanding. I never utter a word. Storytelling is an art. Who am I to interfere with his bardic abilities? Thus Garry’s career was always a lot more interesting for the most people than mine. He met celebrities. He followed stories that were leads in the newspapers and sometimes made national or international news. Also, he appeared on television pretty much every day. People recognized him.

Wires and mics

My work was important and many of the things we use now — from wireless computers to gigantic databases like Google are built on the research of which I was a part. But it’s technical. I worked with celebrities — but unless you were in the high-tech business yourself, you never heard of them. Describing what I did made most people’s eyes glaze over. Trying to explain the differences between object linking and other kinds of databasing, as well as the various combinations or development to someone who hasn’t yet mastered the basics of their home PC? I could see them mentally looking for an escape route. Eventually, I stopped trying to explain what I did unless, by some rare chance, I met someone in my field — another writer or developer. Oh what fun to talk to someone who knew why what I did was so cool or that I had been part of the original DB-1 project team in Rehovot, Israel. Such moments were rare and usually I began and ended by saying “I write technical documents and manuals for software and hardware aimed at professional developers.”

I had interesting stories about Israel and interviewing people who are now very famous, but weren’t back then — like Netanyahu who was Minister of Education when I was running a features newspaper in Jerusalem. He was a regular guy back then, worried more about getting some money to better fun schools. Times change. Also, I’m not quite as much of a ham as Garry is and my stories tend to be pretty much exactly what really happened. I’m not a novelist, verbally or in writing. I also explain everything too much. It’s a hard habit from which to break away. I spent so many years explaining every detail of every product and project, I automatically go into technical mode when someone asks what sounds to me like a technical question.

Meanwhile, Garry’s a ham. Ask him. He’ll tell you. He loves the spotlight and if there’s a video camera involved, he’s there. It doesn’t mean he’s chatty at home, but give him an audience and he is off and running. In mixed company, I never stood a chance. NO ONE was interested in my work except people who did the same kind of work. Nonetheless, I earned a pretty good living and didn’t have to work 16-hours a day. Or wear a suit to work in the middle of a summer heat wave or stand in a blizzard to explain to viewers that, yes, it really is snowing. I always wonder why they send reporters to tell people the weather is bad. Just look out the window.

Garry Armstrong

Nonetheless, together we did interesting things. What I did is a lot more interesting these days than it was back then. I was there when they were figuring out how to make wireless connections and was assured ten years before it happened that soon everything would be wireless. Now people are rather more interested because these obscure things are not so oscure anymore. They are part of everyone’s life and we depend on them. Grandma’s boring career is a lot less boring when your computer isn’t working and you need help making the software function.

I’m not as sharp about software as I was “back in the day” because I haven’t kept up with changes. Retirement is an opportunity to not be involved in all the things you did while you worked. The only time I miss it is when something goes wrong with my computer and the operating system is so different than what I used back then, I have to figure out where Microsoft hid the information this time. All the original information is still in there, but the location is more obscure. On a lot of levels, personal computers have not changed as much as they seem to have changed. Underneath the “user interface,” the computer function much the same as it always did. It just does it much, much faster.

The one guy I hug a lot

I’m glad we had interesting times, individually and together. A lot of things that Garry used to think weren’t very interesting are more interesting to him now, especially since some of the people I met and interviewed — or just talked to — are a big deal internationally in 2020. We may not have money, but we have memories and sometimes, some very peculiar relationships to events that took place many years ago, but changed the world in which we live today. Those five years at The University of Jerusalem’s Environmental Laboratory where we saw that what we are living in now was on the way — what a pity we knew so much about what was happening to the world and did so little about it.