Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs Part 3

What happens here is the cows come into the kill department- that's where they do the slaughter-they lead them in the chute, take them, and they stun them first with a stun gun, then they swing them up with hydraulics, about twenty feet up into the air. These are fullblown cows hanging up there. And while they're still stunned, they slit their throats. The floor is usually a couple of inches deep in blood.

The dead cows go around the room on a hydraulic pulley system so people can do different procedures to them. For instance, they take the hide off. That's the hide puller's job. Someone else takes out the intestines. They split the middle and all the intestines fall out. There's other people who clean the cheek meat off the head. Then they take the tongues and box them separately because we send most of that meat overseas. A lot of places overseas get the specialty parts. Like the Vietnamese-they like to have the intestines and the stomach linings.

Every part of the cow is used. If they find a fetus, they take the blood out of it and send it to universities for research. And they take the fetus's hide-that's used for very fine purses. They even reuse the magnets found in the cows' stomachs. The poor old dumb cows will eat anything, including barbed wire, which rips out stomach lining unless it gets hooked to something, so the farmers feed the cows magnets and they collect all of the metal parts the cows eat. And those magnets, we wash and save them.

After the cows are killed and stripped of their hides and split in half, they're put into a cooler. They have to chill for twenty-four hours because you can't cut warm cows. Then they get pushed into the boning department where there's about a hundred people who take out the bones and turn them into huge chunks of meat. And finally, the chunks go down different a.s.sembly lines on conveyor belts and workers cut them up to what's requested by the customer. All the customers require a special cut.

There's a rendering department here, too. It takes cows that didn't make it into the slaughter portion of the plant. Say if a cow falls down, we're required to shoot that animal and take it to rendering. Farmers bring dead cows there, too. They take them all and put them into a great huge chopper and get rid of them. They grind them up and boil them in big vats into this liquid that eventually becomes land fertilizer. It smells just awful. My husband does not want me to park my car anywhere near there.

It's a big operation. We need to have at least two hundred and seventy workers every day to run the plant. And, like I said, we're just desperate for workers. Last month, I hired eighty-five people and ninety-two left. That's not uncommon. We're bleeding people. I hire them and they leave. No matter how I sell them on the job, they go down there and find it not exactly to their liking. Some people will quit fifteen minutes after they get on the floor because it's so ugly to them. It's a special kind of person who wants to work in a meat-processing plant.

Another problem is that there's never a set schedule. I wish there would be. The employees work from eight to twelve hours a day, but n.o.body knows if they'll be working those twelve-hour days until noon because that's when the orders come in. And we often have temporary workers, so my job is a lot of just making sure they're in the number that I've been asked for and that they're going to the right spots in the plant, never mind if they understand their schedule. That makes people pretty frustrated sometimes. There's been a lot of angry situations.

But the biggest problem is the simple fact that n.o.body wants to kill cows. Not here, anyway. The recruitment, boy, I use every tactic to get people to work in this place. I place ads in the newspaper. I've made these clever little ads with cows. I use the job service, the social services. I go to jails and halfway houses. I call colleges sometimes. I put ads in newspapers in other cities if I hear plants are closing. I use every option I can find.

Basically, if you just look like a fairly decent person, I'll hire you. We don't do any reference checking or anything because we need people so badly. We need people to start tomorrow. I'm serious. We don't have the normal steps used for hiring.

The only thing that would stop us from hiring a person are immigration problems. We have to check their green cards. We watch those like hawks. We take photos of IDs-we require two forms-we check all of their numbers on their green cards. A few years before I got here, Immigration came to the plant and found illegal aliens and we were fined eighty thousand dollars. So there's no more of that.

Unfortunately, and I hate to say this, but I think the only people who would do this job willingly anymore are those illegal aliens- people who can't turn down work.

As it is, the people we hire are from many cultures. They bring a lot of refugees up here, a lot of people who're in turmoil and running away from their homeland. They're making good money. Some of the lowest people, a girl who works as a packer, with the overtime, makes thirty-five thousand a year. That's a lot of money and they can send it back to their families. But still, they're a long way from home, and that's pretty hard on them.

I'd say two-thirds of the people working here right now are from other countries. Very few of them speak any English and they really don't understand our culture at all. Most of them are frightened. I end up trying to help with that, but there's only so much I can accomplish.

There's a three-hour orientation that I've set up for new workers. It's not near enough. All we can really do in that time is give them the rules and regulations. And there's so many people who don't understand English-there's like fifteen different cultures here and none of them speak it. I do a lot of breadbasket interpretation, a lot of things with my hands, and I try to get the workers to help as interpreters. It works okay, but a lot of times I have no idea if the translations make any sense. Heaven knows.

We see about a hundred injuries a year and I'm amazed there aren't more. The main causes are inexperience and repet.i.tion. And drugs. There's no drug testing so some, not many, people come in high. But repet.i.tion is the biggest, I'd say. Everybody works so fast that there's a lot of repet.i.tive injuries. People work the same job all the time and they stop thinking. Workers in a plant like this need to be moved around, but that would require more training and we can barely give what we give now.

There are times when the ambulances come in and out all day. It's awful. And there've been nights when I've been in the emergency room with these people because there was no one else to be with them. I was just there as their friend. I'm really glad no one's died.

A lot of what I end up doing is kind of like social work. I've gone and gotten dentists for the workers if they have bad teeth. Or when their babies are sick, I've found them pediatricians. I've arranged child care for them so they could come into work. I've talked to Immigration about their green cards or other problems they're having. Sometimes, if they get drunk and don't come in, I'll go try and pick them up. The workers who work hard are valuable since so many people quit all the time, so we'll tolerate a lot. I've gone and gotten people out jail. If problems are really bad, I get them to see an actual social worker.

And I'm always trying to make things warmer for these people. Like we'll have safety parties and I'll order pizza. Sometimes we'll have dinner together. I'm kind of like their mom. I've learned to have a lot of compa.s.sion for them. I care for them. But it's very frustrating. I think one of the biggest problems is that I am in constant communication with these people. There really isn't anyone else they could go to for their problems, at work or at home.

They need all kinds of help. Like they tell me, "I have a doctor's bill," and I say, "Don't you pay it, you have insurance." But they don't understand that. They can't talk to the people at the insurance company. It just overwhelms them. They don't understand the safety rules or what's really going on. And the management of the whole place really doesn't care about these people as long as they get the job done. So it's constant for me. I'm never alone, there's always someone in my office. I work these twelve-hour days, six days a week. Most days I take no lunch, no break. It's all work.

I'm going to end up walking out. I have nothing left to give. It's like someone pounding on your head eleven to twelve hours a day. For years. Some mornings I wake up, I can't move.

I get no help from my superiors. I don't even expect help because we've gone through so many managers they don't really know what's going on with the employees. In the last year and half, we went through three. No one's good enough for the family who owns the plant. Right now, one of the sons of the owner is the general manager. And he literally treats the people like meat. He'll look them up and down and see if they can work. He doesn't appreciate anyone. He's not friendly in the least. The workers are so angry about the way things are they write graffiti on the walls and plug up the urinals. They're frustrated, but he doesn't care. I don't actually think he means to do bad, he's just overwhelmed.

The plant is always in trouble with the city over the dumb things we're doing. Sometimes we've dumped blood into the lagoons. Just dumb things. The horrible smell-we got forced to put some kind of chimney filters on the rendering department-and the smell is still just incredible. The city fines us all the time and calls in all kinds of environmental protection agencies. Sanitation comes in every night and sprays everything down with chemicals and we have five government inspectors here who make sure it's clean. If it's not, we can't open in the morning. But still, it stinks. It's reached a point where the city's embarra.s.sed to have us in town, even though we provide a living for many people and a lot of money coming into the community.

There's a stigma for people who work here. There really is. I belonged to several professional organizations, and when they found out where I worked they were like, "Oh my gosh, you work there?" It's not only a stigma because of what's happened, but because of what people a.s.sume has happened. People are just disgusted by it. Yet isn't it funny how people eat all the hamburgers?

I don't why I've stayed here so long. Maybe it's because I'm able to separate the job a little bit when I get home, because of my counseling degree. But I bring home my exhaustion. My husband and I have a little trailer where we go and relax on the weekends. Lately, when we go there, I just sleep. There's nothing left of me to do the things I want to do. I like to cook, read, play around with my family, but I'm just worn out. I don't bring my job home with me, but the exhaustion-you can't escape that.

It's not like a CEO is exempt from ordinary problems of life.

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER.

Robert Devlin.

I'm chairman and CEO of American General Corporation. We're a multiline financial services company dealing princ.i.p.ally in life insurance, pensions, annuities, consumer loans, and investments. Our name has not been that well-known in the general public. Hopefully, it's becoming more well-known as we're doing more advertising. We sponsored the World Series last year, for example, and I think people in the street are starting to recognize American General due to that.

But regardless, we're quite well-known in the investment community because of our results. We're the third largest insurance-based financial services company in the United States. We have about one hundred and twelve billion dollars of a.s.sets and a market capitalization in excess of twenty billion dollars.

The main difference between being a CEO and having another high-level management position is-well, there's not a lot of difference day-to-day. I mean, particularly with a large, complex organization like this, you have to recognize that no one individual can make all the decisions-nor should they. Many other people here besides myself have responsibility for many resources and for many decisions that have to be made. The real difference, particularly with a publicly held company-for better or for worse-is that if your company is performing well, the CEO typically gets that recognition. Conversely, if the company's not doing well, the CEO has to take the downside. And so in that sense there's probably a little bit more pressure with being CEO than with anything else.

I don't mind that pressure. As an individual I've always been somewhat goal-oriented and challenge-oriented. The hardest part of the job for me is just meeting the multiplicity of issues that I'm faced with. Earlier today, I was interfacing with security a.n.a.lysts who are writing reports on the company. In five minutes I'm taking off to see one of our larger shareholders to give them an update on the company. Then, you know, I may come back from lunch and find out we've got hit by a lawsuit. Or I may find out one of my key executives is moving off to another area. And it's like this every day-you're faced with all these things-legal issues, people issues, business issues of sales, profitability. You wake up in the morning and you're never sure how the day is going to unfold. It's a challenge for me to simply make my own schedule. And I have to do that myself because if I let somebody else make it I couldn't get done the things that I need to get done.

There's also an enormous amount of traveling. I spend maybe twenty-five percent of my time in my Houston office and maybe another twenty-five percent in the New York office. And then the balance of my time is spent on the road, visiting shareholders, making presentations, going to some of our corporate meetings, things like that. And everywhere I'm going, each person, each shareholder is different, so it's very challenging from that regard.

We have a corporate jet. That's how I get from point A to B. Which is certainly a very efficient way to travel. But it's not like a CEO is exempt from ordinary problems of life. When I drive around in New York I'm in the same traffic everybody else is in. Even with the jet-two weeks ago we left Houston and it was bad weather in New York and we spent three hours circling. So now, obviously, I try to be as efficient as I possibly can, but I do my fair share of grocery shopping and spending time with my family and, you know, as I always say-when I get up in the morning I put my pants on the same way as the guy that's going to the factory. You can't forget that.

On a personal level, though, it can be very hard. Because we're a publicly owned company, I've got to do what I think is the best thing in the interest of the shareholder, not necessarily what the best thing is for Bob Devlin or for some of my colleagues. As I view it, my number one responsibility is: How well are we performing for our shareholders?

It's not always easy to meet that responsibility. It's like I say to my two sons-and I can remember my father saying this to me-you can be successful at a lot of different things. But what you have to have is, kind of the pa.s.sion, the gumption, and the guts, the intestinal fort.i.tude to stick with things, recognizing that at different stages in your career, we're all going to have to do things that we don't particularly like doing in order to be successful. And I mean things that- obviously not things that are not morally and ethically correct-but I'm just saying things that don't necessarily fit your style. To succeed, you're going to have to make decisions that are very difficult-but you have to make those for the benefit of the organization you're working for.

For example, downsizing. I don't know that many of the CEOs I know-and I know a number of them-that when you have to, you know, do some of this downsizing or you have to have a face-toface conversation with one of your key executives who is not performing then I don't think any of us like that. But you have to accept that as part of your job. I just went through that process, actually. A guy who was a vice chairman of our organization just wasn't fitting in. And I've known this guy for twelve years and it was difficult, but you do it with dignity and fortunately, like in this case, you know, we're still on good speaking terms. He just called me up two weeks ago to tell me he'd become a president and CEO of a small bank in Houston.

A lot of these things sometimes, actually, although they look grueling to the outside people, they're actually of benefit to the people involved. Because why keep people in a position where they're awkward and they know themselves that things aren't working right? Why do that? It's not good for the company, it's not good for the individual. And typically in middle management and senior executive jobs, the first person that realizes they're not doing the job is the person in the job. Because these jobs are very demanding. They're serious jobs. I'm often working eighteen-hour days. I rarely get more than four or five hours a night of sleep. And the way I view it, and I tell the guys, my senior staff, you know, these are seven-day-a-week, twenty-four-hours-a-day jobs. I mean, now, obviously we have our time off and I encourage people taking it. But the fact of the matter is that if a situation pops up and we have to burn up a Sat.u.r.day or a Sunday and go into, you know, the wee hours of the morning, we do so-I mean, I've been in sessions-particularly when you get into mergers and acquisitions where we've walked out of a place at four-thirty in the morning. You kind of have to be prepared to do whatever it takes. If not, you should find something else to do with your time.

I'm fifty-eight. I've worked in this industry more or less my entire adult life. I started out-I graduated from college in 1964 and I began selling life insurance for the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. I spent, all told, thirteen years with Mutual and then joined a small subsidiary company of American General. And I've worked my way up here from that.

I feel that there's a tremendous amount of personal satisfaction that comes with this. I certainly wouldn't take the position that, you know, the money and the financial rewards are insignificant. But I've never been motivated financially. I enjoy the challenge-that's really what keeps me going. The money comes with the territory, but I think that there's a point in time in our lives when you cross that bridge and I just feel that I've been very blessed and fortunate from a financial standpoint-that that is no longer a driving consideration. Right now, I'm able to do this because I like doing it. It's been very gratifying. And the biggest satisfaction for me is not the money, it's being able to develop and work with a team of good executives and then recognizing that what you do for the organization enhances value to your shareholders.

On top of that, I'm a firm believer in the product of life insurance because what you're doing is you're protecting the human life value. The most valuable a.s.set that we all have is our ability to earn an income. And it's interesting that if you go out and buy a house for half a million dollars the first thing you do is buy fire insurance for half a million dollars. Yet if a person is making a hundred thousand dollars a year they should have at least three to four times their annual income in life insurance and yet statistically in America it's way below that. So I think it's a very meaningful product we offer. I think it's a product that everyone really needs as a cornerstone in financial planning. And then when you look at the other pieces of our business, pensions and annuities, now people are more so than ever focused on retiring and-because we're all living longer-the fear of outliving their income.

So it's a very good business and I just feel it's one in which we're, you know, helping people solve their lifetime financial needs. And so I think that from that standpoint it's an excellent business to be in. And with that I'm going to have to sign off.

I don't know if I'll make it to my job tomorrow.

TEMP.

Chris Real.

It's drudgery. You do all the drudge work that everybody else doesn't want to do. It's positions that people can't keep filled and it's work that will make other people go crazy because it's, you know, tedious. And it's a cost-savings, too. All the profits that you see in American business today come from not paying employee benefits. All the money on Wall Street that they're pus.h.i.+ng back and forth comes from people like me paying our own dental bills. [Laughs] Because temping at large corporations is a big deal these days. And you know large corporations don't do anything that doesn't save them money, so they have their work broken up into discrete units that can be done mindlessly. And they bring in temps whenever they need us, and they don't pay us benefits, and they let us go whenever they don't need us anymore. And then they don't pay us unemployment, either. That's a huge cost-saving across the boards.

But it suits me fine. [Laughs] The first time I ever temped was in San Francis...o...b..cause I just died, burnt out as a bike messenger. I did that from when I was like twenty-five till I was in my early thirties and I was like the oldest bike messenger in the city. It's a real b.i.t.c.h job. I was making as much money as I make now, but it's dangerous. It's exhausting and there are all these cars, you know, whipping around you.

So what happened was I was living cheap, in a motel, and I had money saved up and I said, "I gotta do something else." So I learned to type and then I learned some programs and I went and I had one suit, two nice s.h.i.+rts, and a couple of ties and I just showed up at these temp places and filled out the application. They'd ask me what did you use to do and I would say, "Oh, I was a bike messenger and before that I did fast food." And I was really amazed to find out that steady employment is the main thing that temp agencies are impressed with. Employment at anything, because the main problem they have is transitory workers. If someone can hold a job for six months-it doesn't matter what it is-it shows that they have some responsibility.

So I temped for a while in San Francisco, then I moved to D.C. and temped, then I moved here to New York and this is like the kingdom of temping, you know? There's so many jobs here.

My temp agency has a policy, they want you to come in and they have a waiting room and you come in prepared to show up in any midtown office within twenty minutes. You have to dress a certain way, a white s.h.i.+rt and a tie. If you show up between eight and eight-fifteen, they used to have a full breakfast, but a lot of people figured out a scam. They would come in with their beepers and they would eat the breakfast and then go to the other agencies. I do mostly long-term a.s.signments, so I don't have a need for two agencies, and I wasn't pulling any s.h.i.+t like this. But a lot of temps are people who're like actors, who can't work regularly, and they'll have three or four agencies and every morning they'll see which agency gets them work first. So these people, they messed up the free breakfast. Now you just go in and you wait. But whatever, they get me steady work. I like them.

I'm not an actor. I'm not into that. I'm a temp, a forty-year-old temp. Let's leave it at that, okay? I mean, I know there's stigma attached to being a forty-year-old temp. At forty, people a.s.sume you should have achieved something. And they don't see this as an achievement. But I don't care. I'm happy doing this. I've never fit in. The more I see what fitting in is, the less I want to. It's plots that you already know the ending to. Why do you want to live out a story and know that you're gonna do this or do that, you know? A steady job is a plot. I will stay here and I will do this, then I'll retire, then I'll move to Florida. Then I'll die, you know? You spend your days at work dreaming of the future, you spend your days at work getting ready to get off of work. Me, I don't know if I'll make it to my job tomorrow. So it's the moment, living in the moment.

Like last year, I took a vacation. I'd been at this place a couple of months and it was getting old. I called up and said, "I'm going on a vacation." And they're like, "Well, we don't know if we'll have a job for you when you get back." I said, "I know you don't know if you'll have a job for me when I get back 'cause I'm not even sure when I'm coming back." So I went on this bike trip; I took a bunch of time. I love to travel and see things. Two-week vacations just don't do it for me.

So this is perfect. I make sixteen bucks an hour, and a good year, I'll take in like thirty, thirty-five thousand dollars. Which is plenty for me. Most of my jobs last a couple of months, sometimes longer, sometimes less. And there's always another job. I'm at this simple office level. I'm usually just filing and answering phones, typing up a few letters, some computer work-Excel, Microsoft Word. That's basically what it is. Grunt work-and there's tons of demand for it right now.

A lot of companies only need you for a specific thing. And they just want it to run smoothly so they'll be very nice to you. Like, I worked for Dean Witter a couple of weeks ago, and all I did was I answered the phone maybe twice a day for a guy who wasn't in. He had voice mail, but every now and then somebody would call and say, "Hey, can I get his voice mail?" So I'm like, "Well, call back and let it ring two more times." That was the job.

They had a computer with a very fast Web connection, so I spent hours surfing and I answered the phone when it rang. They were wonderful. They showed me where the company cafeteria was and they had like five varieties of coffee and a little woman who was doing hors d'oeuvres stuff. I loved it. I was really grieving when the week ended.

On the longer a.s.signments, I sometimes have to learn a whole filing system or something. It can get a little more involved. But I like that even better. 'Cause once you learn what you need to know, it's always basic stuff, it's always easy, and so you get into a groove, and then you can do things on your own. Some jobs I've managed to read like a book a week and get paid for it. It's great.

It's also really nice working with people-well, I mean it's kind of perverse-but it's nice seeing that they're miserable because they're full-time. The more I work with corporate drones, the more they remind me that they're miserable. People are always telling me, "Ew, this sucks!" And then when I do their job, I find myself saying, "Yeah, I couldn't do this for twenty years." The thing that keeps me going is the fact that I don't stay at any place very long.

Like these people where I'm working now, there's like a bunch of folks doing proofreading and their boss blames them for everything he screws up and when the s.h.i.+t comes down, he lies to his boss. He blames the proofreaders. "They didn't do what I said and blah, blah, blah." But he never gives any instructions at all. Then his boss yells at the proofreaders and he yells at them. And these people, they're not doing anything wrong, but they don't stand up for themselves. This one woman, she said to me, "I won't stand up for myself because it's pointless. Because ultimately he can outrank me." And I'm like, wow, I don't care! If he comes at me with his bulls.h.i.+t, I will walk away like that! [Snaps fingers] Oh yeah. And it doesn't look bad on your resume, because you don't put your individual jobs on a resume. You can always walk.

I left a job once during lunch, while my boss was gone. She was a total psycho. She was hired as a temp but she had gotten this filing system that she claimed only she understood, and the people above her just didn't have the time to learn it. So she got hired full-time. She cultivated this image of a hurried and hara.s.sed, hardworking, putupon person. But during the summertime she would take three days off a week. And when she was off, me and this other temp found the system was not difficult and did not require her presence at the office. And a lot of her other work was just she would retype everything over and over and over. She would not cut and paste. You know, she made three copies of everything. She was totally incompetent.

So once this started coming out and becoming obvious to everybody in the office, she got p.i.s.sed at me. It was like-they had me sitting between the fax machine and the printer-and I was really cramped in there. And she would walk by and she would b.u.mp into my chair with her hips as she was walking by getting stuff. Just hit it. I'm talking about wow! What's up?

She was basically taking it out on me. She felt like she had been one-upped. I had no interest in taking her job, but I think in her mind she was afraid I was going to get her fired so I could have it. So at one point she yelled at me for something that was really stupid and I was like, I'm gonna deal with this because I'm not a kid anymore. [Laughs] I'm a big man. So I just walked during lunch.

My agency didn't care. Because if you're on an a.s.signment for five months, there's nothing that you can do wrong, short of shooting somebody. If you lasted that long on an a.s.signment, a good agency doesn't think you're incompetent. A good agency knows there's so much bulls.h.i.+t in corporate America that quitting or getting fired has nothing to do with how well you work. Like so many places have this thing about acting busy. "Act busy! Act busy! Act busy!" That's all they care about. Literally. Or like, "Just do it." That's another one. Anytime there's a rush job, everybody's like, "I don't care, we're gonna get this done on time. Just do it!" Like this is the magic word-just do it. Never mind planning or quality or common sense. Just do it! [Laughs] That's one of my catchphrases, whenever someone tells me to just do it, I say, "Excuse me, am I working for Nike? Last time I looked, I'm not working for Nike. I don't work for Nike, I work for you and you can't tell me to just do it because I'm not here to just do it." [Laughs]

I don't understand why somebody would sit at a chair and develop lower back problems and take this s.h.i.+t year after year. Actually, I do understand it. They do it because long-term employment implies that you are necessary. It means they need you and in our society being needed is what matters. The most fearful thing in this society is for no one to care about you. That's why people are afraid of being old. So if you can be old and still have something that's necessary, then you don't mind. But that's not a positive thing. It's like, you know, you're just basically a lapdog for the powers that be and you aren't doing anything worthwhile. I mean when you answer the phone for twenty years, what have you done?

It's like Harrison Ford was being interviewed one time and they were asking him what was the most satisfying job he'd ever had- 'cause he'd done a lot of jobs. And he said, "Well, one day I was paid to shovel coal in this bas.e.m.e.nt. I had to move big piles from one side of the room to the other side of the room. And I really liked that because at the end of the day you could see what you did. I did something here. There-that pile of coal-I did that."

And you know, I've worked in a thousand different offices and I don't think I've ever heard a person say anything like that. I mean, n.o.body in these jobs has that kind of satisfaction. n.o.body. And so I'm with f.u.c.king Harrison on this one. [Laughs] I wish I was young again. I would just go do heavy lifting. Get the h.e.l.l out of corporate America. Because speaking from experience, no matter how long you do this, when it's all over, most likely you're gonna be at the bottom of the barrel like everybody else.

If he wants, this guy can go onto his

hacker BBS and say, "Yo! What's up,

dudes? I just broke into a university

and I've got five hundred pa.s.swords!"

SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR.

Don B.

I've been in this cube for about five years. I work as a systems programmer and administrator for the math and computer science departments of a pretty large university. "Administrator" kind of says it, right? I manage the resources and help people use them. In plain English, it's like being a janitor, private detective, sheriff, and carpenter all at once-on the Internet.

I found computers my soph.o.m.ore year of college, and it was like this whole new world. Before then, I was this shy, you know, bookwormish guy. I read a lot, kept to myself. And all of a sudden, you know, I started meeting people online whom I could interact with, which was really exciting to me.

But more than that, it was like, I could spend hours and hours and hours on a computer exploring, figuring things out, trying to write programs. And the way operating systems are organized it was like-meeting an old, old friend that I hadn't seen in a long, long time. Really. It was like endless puzzle. I just felt it was fascinating. I mean, you open up these things and see all the circuitry and the design. I would go and get the schematics and study-okay, how does the code flow through these chips? I spent years just looking at that stuff and understanding it.

After finis.h.i.+ng school, I went to work in a corporation for eight months, and I hated it. I couldn't dig the formalities and politics of the corporate life. It was stressful and stifling all at the same time. So I came here. This place is the complete opposite of the corporate world. My manager and I set goals, and I pursue them by whatever means I want to. I'm not micro-managed at all. Sometimes I come in at eleven, twelve, maybe even later, and stay here till eleven at night. Sometimes I stay all night. And then some days I come in, I'm a little sour, so I browse the Web for three hours and [laughs], then I go drink a beer for lunch and come back and I'm like, "Ah, s.h.i.+t, I'm not doing anything today."

There are four of us on staff here to handle five networks that consist of approximately eight hundred to nine hundred computers and about twenty-three hundred users. The machines are mostly for users to log in to to get their e-mail, do their homework, do research, applications development, systems development. At any given time, we might have two hundred to three hundred people logged on. They can log on from anywhere. They could be in this building, at home, in Korea or Europe.

One part of my job is all these users send e-mail to me if they have problems or they need resources. Some e-mails take two minutes to handle. Some might take two hours or two days. An undergrad might e-mail me saying, "My e-mail doesn't work!" On average I get like thirty requests a day from undergrads. During the really busy time of the year, when everyone comes back to school-last fall in a fifteen-day period I got seven hundred e-mails.

At the same time I'm getting bombarded by requests from higher up, and since they're the ones who bring in the money with grants and donations, they get pretty much whatever they need whenever they need it. A graduate student might need a brand-new compiler for FORTRAN code for some research he's doing. We may or may not have it. Do we purchase it and install it for him? I have to find out, well, who is this guy? Does he have even the authority to request this? And something like this-it's never just days. It's weeks. And in that time this guy maybe makes the request ten, twelve times, progressively getting more stressed out. So he's one out of twenty-three hundred.

It's a lot. We also have gigabytes of software that we maintain, and hardware-if the system hard drive goes down, then I have to reinstall the operating system and remake the machine to be identical as it was before it crashed. Which is about probably seven, eight hours of my time. And in that period of the machine being off, who knows how many people have been inconvenienced? They usually let me know. [Laughs] Four people administering all of that, it's inappropriate. It's too much.

That's just the custodial aspect of the job. The sheriff part-okay, one day I come into work and I have a query from a system administrator in another department. He's like, "Someone or something is fingering our machines like every two seconds." "Finger" is a utility you can use to get public information on a user-when that person was logged in, whether or not they're currently logged in, where they're logged in from.

I check it out, and I discover a Ph.D. student who's written a little program to finger women on campus. He had about six women that he was fingering every twenty seconds. Sounds dirty, right? I'm like, "Are these people friends of his?" I don't know. It's a little freaky. So I killed his program and suspended his account. Then the kid came in and wanted his account back and I said, "Do you know these people?" And he's like, "No, they're just girls I'm interested in. If they're in a lab maybe I'll go over there and introduce myself." I said, "I think that's called "stalking." And he was like, "I'm not stalking!"

So my boss said, "Why don't you send e-mail to each of the people he was fingering, tell them what he was doing, and ask them if they approve of this." Which was smart. And of course every single one of the women was like, "I don't know who that f.u.c.king freak is!" They were all really p.i.s.sed off. Rightfully so.

Then I find out the same guy ended up coming here precisely because he was expelled from another university for hara.s.sing women. So he's obviously got a problem. But in the end, what happened? They gave him his account back. I don't think they ever took any sort of course of action against this student.

This kind of thing makes me dissatisfied or, you know, not totally happy with my job. You have all these lifers, or people that work here for fifteen years who are just like, "Aaah, you see that kinda stuff all the time. Ignore it." Okay, I'll ignore the fact that we've got a stalker on campus. Sure. No problem.

When I first started to work here I could see everything so clearly. Oh, yeah, that's f.u.c.ked up. That's broken. And I knew how to fix it in ten minutes. But you start dealing with people and politics and-I don't know. It's weird. Your rate of progress slows way down. You only see things sort of hazily. And any organization you'll ever walk into-it exists everywhere. But-it's sort of like the death of an organization in a way.

For the most part, I really enjoy what I do. And I don't know how many people can say after five years they enjoy what they do. You have good days and bad days. But-I guess now that I think about it, the bad days lately have been strung along-for the past three months. [Laughs] I don't know. I've had this one experience lately that's really changed my life. My whole perspective on computers and networks, really.