"Too Much History."
I met a friend at a bar on N. Portland Ave. last night. The unique thing about the bar is that the front door is 35 ft from where I spent around four years working for the Business Products Division of Tandy Corp. circa 1985. This is where I got my start in the business computing world and accounting. I answered tech support calls, wrote data bases for specific client applications, provided marketing support to sales, blah, blah.
It was cool to be back over there last night, and I couldn't help but think about those days for a few minutes. And whenever I think of those days, one of those days in particular always comes back to me. It is the day I was good enough.
There is plenty of evidence and no shortage of people in my life to document with some degree of certainty that I'm not good enough - no matter how good I am. Note that I didn't say. "I'm no good." I know better than that. I'm just not good enough.
But on this certain day, I answered one of about 40 tech support calls I was destined to answer that day. It was from the El Paso Computer Center, and I talked some girl through fixing a problem with her customer's accounting software. The call took about four minutes. I let her tell me what was wrong, walked her through fixing it (ignoring her as she told me what I was doing wouldn't work), had her test it and listened to her almost yell, "It Works!, It Worked! You Fixed It."
The Center Manager grabbed the phone out of her hands and proceeded to thank me profusely. It was a good day. Someone actually said, "Thank You." I went on to the next call, and the one or two more after that.
The next thing I know, my boss is standing at my desk, white as a ghost. "What did you do? The National Training and Support Manager from Ft Worth is on the phone and wants to talk to you. You must be in big trouble. What did you do and why didn't you tell me?"
I had no idea what I had done, or why God's own second in command would call me. I answered the call. "How did you fix it?" (No introduction, no clues given as to what 'it' was.) I asked what we were talking about, having no idea that it was about the call from El Paso.
The guy on the phone was irritated. He assumed I knew that a whole bunch of people had been working on this problem for weeks unsuccessfully. For this call, he had assembled four department heads from the Ivory Towers of the Corporate Offices. He interrogated me for 20 minutes about how I solved that problem, and was cranky and intense the whole time. Me? I just answered the call and made the problem go away, like I did almost every call. I didn't think anything through or document my thought process.
But I did conquer the problem. That day I was good enough. And they knew it at the highest levels of the national office. That day, I was a hero and a stud and a genius, and didn't even know it.
It's good to have days like that easily accessible in one's mind. They make good medicine for the really shitty days when nothing goes right. I have several, maybe even a lot of those days I can relive whenever [fill in the blank] is telling me I'm not good enough...again.
And it was good to relive a few bright moments from my 20's, even if it is ancient history.
One other tidbit of history, just for fun. On that very same spot of Earth, some 60 years ago, before the story above happened, before there were paved roads or buildings there, my dad worked at Boots & Saddles Riding Academy getting horses ready to ride and taking care of them when the rides were over. That's kind of cool too.