$ and Typos

copyright 2005 Dale Hansen - no reproduction without permission


I went through the seventh grade in the booming metropolis of Red Wing Minnesota. One fateful day in December of 1972, our junior high school had…

… for one day only…

…a ….

…COMPUTER!

Yes Red Wing, a little town you’d miss if you blinked, and wouldn’t miss if you’d knew what it was like to live there, had a computer for one entire day. There were no parades or fanfare, but that was because computer time was too expensive to waste on such frivolities.

Our science teacher was in charge of the computer, a responsibility he took as seriously as if he held the single key to the vault at Fort Knox.

Each and every one of us in the seventh grade was going to get some “processing time” on the COMPUTER.

Whether we wanted any or not.

I spent my day with the all the aplomb of a 12 year-old in a waiting room while the dentist readies for a root canal. Each hour of the day, as we started another class, the COMPUTER mantra was repeated again and again.

“COMPUTER time is expensive! When you are selected you must spend as little time with the COMPUTER as possible! We only have the COMPUTER for a day and we need to process all of you!”

I wasn’t sure what was involved upon selection, but being processed through a machine didn’t sound like an enjoyable activity.

I was in math class, studiously ignoring theorems and other hieroglyphics when my number came up. The science teacher opened the door to the classroom and called my name in sonorous tones. James Cagney was summoned to the last mile in Angles with Dirty Faces in just the same way. I was told to leave my books at my desk, as I “would have no further use for them” where I was going.

The hallway I had walked (and occasionally run) a hundred times before now seemed to stretch out endlessly. White tiles, flickering florescent lights and regularly spaced, unmarked doors seemed more … well … institutional than ever.

My teacher walked beside me, keys jingling echoes against the unbroken walls, interspersed only by our footsteps.

We arrived at a door in the corner of the building. This door had never been opened in the entire six months I had attended this school. There were schoolyard rumors and stories about what was hidden behind there, none of them ended well.

The keys that had called out our progress down the hallway came out and with a flourish, he fished the correct one from thirty of its identical companions. The door opened and with a squeal of rarely used hinges harking to the Inner Sanctum, I saw – a room.

That was it. A room. A blinding white, flickering light, empty, sterile, musty smelling expanse of… emptiness.

Set halfway into the room, it’s short edge flush against a wall, was a small table and one uncomfortable, too-cruel-for-the-Spanish-Inquisition, straight-backed wooden chair. I was walked toward this and as I grew nearer, I realized that what I thought was a table had little letter buttons on it like a typewriter.

All this hoopla over an electric typewriter? My mother had one of those! This monstrosity was nearly as long as I was tall and looked like it weighed more than my brother’s motorcycle. Why lock the door? Who ever could walk out with this under his arm wasn’t going to be deterred by a little lock!

“Sit”, I was instructed. I sat. I stared at those keys and panic started to bubble up. I wasn’t allowed on Mom’s typewriter, it was too expensive (I kept breaking things). The old manual typewriter I was allowed to use, I hadn’t. I had no idea how to type. I always figured it was a skill I would never use anyway, like algebra.

“The COMPUTER is in Minneapolis,” I was told, “at the university. “COMPUTER time is expensive and they can’t even accommodate their own students, so you better make this fast.”

Then, just to be sure that I fully understood the pressure, “And this is a long distance phone call too!”

Now sweating bullets, I offered my place in the limited COMPUTER time go to some one else. Anyone else.

No, this was required as a COMPUTER class.

Joy.

He dialed an ordinary phone and listened for a few moments. Suddenly, and without warning, he jammed the phone into this typewriter table - into a rubber piece that looked like it was made for the receiver.

“Here,” a piece of paper was thrust into my hands, “type this in – Quickly – Quickly!”

I grabbed the page, laid it next to the keys and stopped cold. What was on the paper looked like something I might have written on Mom’s old typewriter if I were wearing mittens and not looking.

“PERFORM, ACCEPT, Display”

“NO! ALL CAPITALS! – Just like on the page! Start again!”

PREFORM

“NO! Start again!”

I finally got all way to the end of the list, though by this time I was sweating so much the wooden chair beneath me was beginning to rot. I did it! I got it all! Only one line left!

STOP RUM.

“NO! Not RUM! RUN! “N”! NOT “M”! START OVER! YOU’RE WASTING MONEY! HURRY, HURRY, YOU’VE BEEN HERE TOO LONG AS IT IS! WE HAVE TO GET ALL OF YOU THROUGH THIS IN ONE DAY! DO IT AGAIN!”

Having a livid science teacher, snow blindness from faulty florescence lights bouncing off of a white tile floor and a keyboard where the letters weren’t even close to alphabetical order started to take it’s toll.

In a panic, I repeated the pig-latin-nonsensical random collection of letters, I check and rechecked as I hunted and pounded each key individually as they made their little gunshot noises, while a livid teacher paced the room like a angry, trapped cat.

Finally I had it done, there may have been one or two typos, but as my instructor said – “We’ll have to live with it, THERE’S NO MORE TIME!”

I had written my first computer program. HE ran it, as I could no longer be trusted to press the right buttons. Out of the middle of this typewriter table, a sheet of paper started to blossom with all the sounds of a derailed train as the entire assembly began to shake with the effort of the extraction .

On this piece of paper was the following result of my ordeal. It read as follows:

X
XX
XXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XX
XX
XX

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

That was the end result of the first program I ever wrote. I knew then that computers were simply not practical nor were they particularly useful.

I also realized that whatever the future of these overblown-over-hyped-useless machines, they would not, in anyway way involve me.

---

Oh, by the way, on an unrelated note:

I just had an anniversary of sorts.

I’ve been a programmer now for ten years.


...sigh...

Raging Bro

copyright 2005 Dale Hansen - no reproduction without permission

I was about six years old when my brother married.

They were both 18 and going to college. Every penny they earned went to higher education so neither they nor their parents could afford an apartment for the young couple. Married dorm rooms were virtually unheard of. Co-ed dorms were just coming into vogue, but no “decent” girl lived in one of those. I still don’t know why that didn’t apply to the guys.

When they were married, my mother tried to explain the changes relating to my life. She told me that I hadn’t lost my brother; I’d gained a new sister. Since I didn’t get along with the old one, this was a fresh chance.

My parents had a large home with a full sized basement. They furnished this downstairs area into an apartment for the young couple to live rent-free, though the commute to school was far. Still, it beat paying rent.

One day when everyone was home – it must have been a weekend, I bragged to the little girl next door that I had a brand new sister.

Being no fool, she didn’t believe me, as she’d recently seen my mother who showed no signs of pregnancy. When I tried to explain that my brand new sister was 12 years older than I, she called my bluff.

I set out to prove it to her.

The basement had window wells. These were little tiny windows that leaked under piled snow, were too small for any sort of decent illumination, and were too high inside the basement to reach. Why they were ever put there is a mystery, unless it was for this particular day in the life of a curious six-year-old.

I knew that looking into someone’s bedroom was wrong. I wasn’t sure why, but it was definitely wrong. But there certainly didn’t seem to be any issue looking into someone’s kitchen. I did that all the time; our huge upstairs kitchen window looked out into the back yard. I would wave at my mother as she washed dishes just to see soap bubbles fly as she waved back.

Newlyweds do not understand this convention. Looking down into their kitchen, I showed my neighbor my new sister; both of us gazing through the tiny window. My brother must have had something wrong, because he was holding his robe open while she was sitting on a chair in front of him. I couldn’t see the problem because of the way he held the robe, but it must have hurt, because she leaned in to kiss it and make it better..

I was naturally concerned for my bother’s well being.

Then he saw me. From the expression on his face, I became far more concerned for my own well being.

“Stay there!” he yelled at me through the thick glass and flew out of the kitchen.

Yeah, right!

I may have only been six, but I knew better than to stand and wait for him to come and pummel me.

Here was the problem: the door into the house was at one end of a hallway. The door to basement was at the other. My father was in the den watching TV (I hoped), but the den door was right next to the basement door.

I pelted inside, abandoning my neighbor in a puff of dust and pumped my little legs down the hallway. As I got neared the other end, I could hear my brother’s footsteps pounding on the stairs – he even ran angry.

I kept praying that dad was still in the den, and hadn’t gone for a snack. If he had, I would be trapped in a room with no exit and an enraged 18 year-old brother.

He was there! Dad was sitting on the couch, watching wrestling. As I skidded around the corner of the door jam into the den, I could hear the basement door crashing open immediately behind me. I leap the distance of the width of the den, landing on the couch next to my father. He looked down at me in pure shock as a six-year-old missile landed almost on his lap. I looked up at him with big, wide-open eyes and in my best little happy voice I said, “I love you daddy!”

He didn’t have time to reply before my brother burst into the room and pointed at me “COME HERE!” he yelled.

Yeah, right!

I shook my head and tried to crawl into my father’s hip pocket.

“COME HERE!” my brother bellowed.

“What in the world did he do?” my father asked, shocked a second time in less than a minute.

“He…HE…” my brother choked on the answer. He couldn’t bring himself to describe what it was I had done.

Between running up stairs in a full wrath and the embarrassment of trying NOT to explain to his father what I caught him doing, my brother’s face turned so red I though it was going to blow off.

He left the room, still fuming and sputtering, growling vague but dire threats to me as he left. My father asked me what I had done and I told him the entire story, as I have here.

He asked me what it was they were doing in the kitchen, I said I didn’t know, but she was sitting in front of him as he held his robe open. I said I thought maybe she was looking at an owie.

I was lectured and scolded for looking into windows.

It was a lesson I took to heart, probably more so because I have never before or since heard anyone who could give a severe and strict reprimand while laughing.

Literary Manipulations

copyright 2005 Dale Hansen - no reproduction without permission

I am a bibliophile – that means I love books. If only I could get paid for it, I would gladly spend the rest of my life reading.

My mother taught me to love books.

Let me rephrase that. She tricked me into loving books.

She would read to me every night; stories about green eggs and ham, floppsie-whosits and wobbly-what-nots. The contents of these spellbinders were frankly less than stimulating, but I was there for the time I got to spend with her. It was the comforting tune of her voice, lilting and falling and breezing by that I loved. I never paid attention to any single word.

She got me to read sometimes, to see if I could and how well. I did, but grudgingly.

I missed her reassuring voice when all I could hear was my own, worse - I actually had to pay attention to the words.

Still, if that was the price I had to pay to have her read to me, I would pay it.

She knew I was a better reader than these books allowed for, but I stubbornly refused to read on my own or even to her except under duress. So in a malicious act of cold and calculated motherly love, she bought me a grown up book.

She brought it home and snuck it into a shelf while I was at school. When I got home she said “I bought you a book today, but I’m beginning to think that maybe I shouldn’t have. I’m afraid it may be too adult for you.”

BAM! Direct hit to the burgeoning male ego.

Too adult? Not possible! I was a grown up from the age of three! Just ask me!
“No it’s NOT!” I protested, though at that point I hadn’t yet seen the book and had no idea what it was. That was beside the point anyway.

“I don’t know,” she hemmed and hawed and played me like a master fisherman, until sure I was hooked.

“Where is it?” I demanded.

“It’s on the shelf with the other books, I put it away when I thought that maybe it was beyond you. Maybe we should wait a few years.”

BAM! There was NO WAY I was going to let this go now! Too adult! Beyond me! That book was mine, and I was going read it if I had to eat it first!

I flew into the living room and scanned the shelves, looking for something that hadn’t been there before. She’d put it on the shelf it in such away that the spine stuck out from the stack like a neon sign.

White Fang by Jack London. Fange? Cool! A vampire book! I slid it out and looked at the cover.

It had a dog on the front. Even better, I love dogs!

I ran back into the kitchen and handed it to her.

“This one?” I chirped hopefully.

She confirmed it was the right book. I begged her to read to me, but she said that it would have to wait until nighttime.

Nighttime came and she was “too tired’ and had a “headache” so she wasn’t able to read to me. My happy little face fell so hard it hit the floor, and great tears began to well up inside.

“But,” she said, “You can read to me if you really think you can handle that book.”

BAM! I’ll show her! I started reading to her. I read for more than an hour that night, and then nearly two the next. On the third night she announced she was too tired to read or be read to, and maybe I should put the book away and choose a floppsie-whapsie-toppsie book.

I put it away, but was too proud to revert back to the “children’s books”. In the middle of night - in the wee still hours (it was probably after 9PM!) I snuck out of my room and snagged White Fang and snuck it back. I devoured that book cover to cover under the glow of a flashlight. The blankets over my head where lit up like a paper lantern.

I found out many years later, that my mother had deviously planned my entire adventure.

What an underhanded, dirty, manipulative trick!

I love it.

And thank you, Mom for tricking me into new worlds and expanding my horizons in ways I never would have dreamed possible.