There is no more empowering experience than to have a job that you just don't give a shit about.  Such was the case during my career in IT at a national environmental health research facility in Research Triangle Park, NC. It was not that I didn't take pride in doing my job well; only that, having done a good job, I didn't give a rat's ass who noticed.  Computer support was hardly where I had planned to end up. Fate put me in a position to need an income, but not really care how I earned it. My husband was finishing graduate school at North Carolina State University and I was sitting in a holding pattern until our lives should really begin, whatever that means. We had never not been poor students or underpaid academics, so our income needs were minimal.  Short of prostitution, I was pretty flexible job-wise.

Reasonably intrigued by computers, I especially enjoyed starting a job where I had little practical previous experience.  Flying by the seat of your pants is still flying, and thus fairly exhilarating.  Each day, a call might take me to the desk of secretary or  to the lab of a Nobel prize winner.  You might be surprised which one was harder to teach how to use a mouse.

But filling out the documentation associated with tracking "action requests" is just painful.  So, for the most part, I chose not to do it.  And answering the nagging calls of impatient computer illiterates begins to wear you down, so I had a strict policy for prioritizing work: assholes last.  Free from any nagging worries about losing the job, I was able to observe, contemplate, and enjoy the people around me.

Front line computer support departments feature a ceaseless revolving door of employees. At federal offices, the job is done by contractors, not civil servants. The federal employees were a mixture of diehard losers and talented masochists. But the IT contractors were a special breed of ne'er-do-wells and time-biders. New employees were constantly needed to replace the old losers whose tricks had all been played out or the those who got bored and clocked out voluntarily.  Our department was known to have had a guy who started at 8 am one fine Monday, took an early lunch break, and never came back. He was a folk hero to many of us.

My best friend at work was Sean, a dropout from UNC's PhD program in philosophy.  Sean, a recovering drug addict, was clearly running, maybe hiding, from something. I never asked. Sean was the slacker's slacker. He had what I call synaptic dyskinesia.  I suppose that's actually just a bad case of ADHD, but synaptic dyskinesia sounds so much better and so much less mundane.  Because Sean was anything but mundane.  Sean and I ranged the hallways and stairwells shooting the shit: discussing music, politics, world history, philosophy, religion, you get the picture. Sean spent his barely-earned paycheck on guitars he could barely play. Sean dubbed the animal research facility in the basement Mauschwitz.  Sean introduced me to The Church of the Sub-Genius.  Sean painted cityscapes dotted with a twisted version of Bozo he dubbed The Devil Clown. From Sean I learned the pure joy of letting your mind drift.

Sean named Fat Ellen "Fat Ellen." Pearl of wisdom coming your way: to get by you either need to be hardworking or to be clever; you don't really need to be both. Fat Ellen was neither. And if you are neither hardworking, nor clever, your days are numbered. Fat Ellen was, as you have guessed, fat (about the same size as me).  But that's not why we called her Fat Ellen. Fat Ellen was the most lugubrious and slothful living human I've ever known. Fat Ellen lumbered down the halls, moving between tasks moaning and sighing. Much of IT-work is just remembering the solutions to dozens of trivial issues.  Fat Ellen could barely remember her name and would have sighed at the thought of having to do so.  No one was shocked when Fat Ellen left by mutual agreement with management.

But to our utter shock, Fat Ellen's replacement was her husband, Gary.  I guess they worked out some sort of job swap wherein Gary put on an oversized white shirt and baggie, blue polyester slacks and went to work with us, while Fat Ellen took his place on the couch eating Cheetos all day. Wearing his holey sweatpants. Gary was the classic IT department employee.  Sometime in the 3rd grade Gary fell in love with video games and decided to major in computer science.  After he had squeaked through college, he waited for the gaming companies to come calling.  Right. Gary didn't even last as long as Fat Ellen did.

The hiring of Gary should have caused a crisis of confidence for us. After all, our manager had hired one-morning guy, Fat Ellen, Gary, Sean, and me. Her hiring skills surely needed work, but there was another side to our manager that we loved.  Sean, the namer, named her The Hammer.  The Hammer had a propensity to anger, but an amazing ability to channel it. The Hammer would occasionally take you into her office and scold you harshly, in private. But the instant someone outside the organization publicly dissed you, The Hammer would lash out. She had your back and more.  The Hammer had no problems firing off nasty missives defending her team of losers. And The Hammer always used "Reply-All."

Not long after I started working for The Hammer, she created a web page for customers to use to request help.  On the page, the customer entered name, email address, and "description of problem." The page then generated an email that went to me, and to The Hammer. The site was meant for internal usage, but this was the early days of the Internet, so the security on the page was exactly nil. My husband, bored at his lab one Saturday, surfed on over to the page and requested my help.  Yes, it could've been very bad.  As it was, it was bad enough. His problem?  "My butt has a hole in it. And a crack, too."  And Beavis entered his actual email address!  The Hammer took it in stride and offered us both some helpful advice: spackle. If I'm ever a manager, I promise to be like The Hammer.

But I also learned there that I didn't want to be a manager.  I frequently found myself down in Mauschwitz, fixing the computer of another contractor manager, Al. (Interestingly, Al's computer operated the giant cage-washing machine, which was controlled by a very powerful, for the time, computer processor. The interface to it was only a modem, but it was the smartest dishwasher I ever fixed.) Al's employee's were the poor souls who cleaned and tended the cages of the research animals.  Many of his employees had to juggle their jobs with meetings with parole officers.  But their workplace problems weren't much different from many of those working above ground. Many hated their jobs and their co-workers, sound familiar?  I saw Al break up a fist fight one time.  "Good to be a manager?" I snickered.  "Oh yeah." replied Al.  None for me thanks, Al.

After my husband finished grad school and started earning actual money, I had the opportunity to ponder what I really wanted to do. I ended up as a software engineer and I loved every minute of it.  But these days I have no job and it is driving me batshit crazy.  WTF? Sometimes I even miss the worst job I ever had.

Would you like some fries, er, software, with that?