A Life Wasted

New House

Lady loved the new house. Since we left Alaska she'd been cooped up in a small house with a wolf pack of children, so Lady loved being set free to run the woods. The moment she was out of the car she was in the woods, soiling her beautiful black coat by rolling in the dirt, then in the creek, then back in the dirt again. It was like she was trying to cleanse herself of the scent of civilization. In no time she was engaging in her favorite recreational pass-time; playing with a porcupine. We never actually witnessed Lady playing with a porcupine, but we always knew when she had done so. She'd come home whining knowing how painful it would be to have the quills removed from her nose. I lost count of how many times this happened. She was smart in most things, but she had a weakness of porcupines. We didn't have a lot of porcupines in our woods, but Lady was on a first name bases with the ones that were there.

The house was rustic and without electricity, but we loved it. Well, Mary and I loved it but our children had mixed thoughts. The house sat on a lovely twenty-one acres, all wooded with a creek running through the center of the property. There were deep gullies and hills, hundred year-old capped oil wells and boulders that stood fifteen feet out of the ground. Each of our neighbors had twenty acres. We could see one neighbor's house through the tress but not the other. The property behind us was 500 acres that no one lived on. Our house sat so far from the road that you couldn't see it when you drove by. And there was wild life. Of course we had porcupines, but we also had deer in abundance, turkey, and black bear. By my way of thinking it was perfect.

This was 1998, so those of you old enough will remember the concern over Y2K. For those too young to remember I'll give a brief explanation. Computer programmers had always used a two digit field length for the year in a date field. For example, 1998 was entered "98" because there was only two digits allowed for the field. This practice made sense back in 1982 when I started programming, but along about 1996 programmers began to be aware of a coming problem. Date fields are often used to calculate the passage of time in a program. Non-programmers might not realize this, but in nearly every program of any size the date as it relates to other dates is generally an interracial part of the functions the program performs. So in 1996 programmers began to sound the alarm that when 2000 rolled around many old programs would fail to one degree or another. When a program subtracts 97 from 98 it gets 1, as in one year. However, when it subtracts 97 from 00, rather that get 3 (as in 1997 from 2000) it either gets 97, or depending on how the program was written, the program crashes in confusion.

So leading up to the year 2000 programmers were shouting alarms. I was one of them in that I knew that every program I'd ever written would fail when the year 2000 rolled around. Among the things that were expected would fail would be the nation wide power grid. So in 1998 I was concerned over what would happen when December 31, 1999 became January 1, 2000. And so you don't think I was being crazy about this, most programmers shared this opinion. There was a full on international push to fix the "Y2K Bug", but most programmers didn't believe it could be fixed in time.

It was out of concern for the power grid failing to the Y2K Bug that we made the decision to leave the home we bought in Amish mode. As it was built by and only lived in by an Amish family the home had never been connected to the power grid, so it was a fairly simple matter to leave it non-electric. We bought the same brand of coal furnace the Amish used, the same type of kerosene lanterns they used, and we used a small gas powered engine to pump water from our well and into the pressure tank to run water throughout the house. We even used the outhouse that was there, though I did dig a new hole and move it. We took our cooking system one step further than most of our Amish friends though. Most Amish in our area cook with kerosene fueled stoves, but Mary wanted a wood burning cook stove so we purchased a large impressive "Kitchen Queen" brand stove. It was so big and heavy we had to use a fork lift and six borrowed men to get it into the house.

The exception we made for electricity was my computer. I did most of my work from home so I needed electricity for my computer and I needed good Internet access. Since we lived so far out in the country dial-up was the only on-line option, but because our local phone company operated with an old analog switcher connections were so slow they were often dropped for going under the Internet's speed limit. Bet you didn't know they had one.

For power I went with a generator to charge a small bank of golf cart batteries (cheep, but affective) the ran it through a AC converter I bought from Wal-Mart. It was a crude system that I eventually augmented with solar panels. To get on the Internet I went with a just released Direct TV satellite system designed just for Internet access. As the first such system it was a bit crude in that it combined dial-up for all uploaded data and satellite for all downloaded files. Meaning, when I typed in the name of a web site to load the site, that command traveled through my phone line to the Internet, but when the web site appeared on my computer it traveled to me across the satellite dish attached to the side of my barn. Oh yeah, I set my office in the barn. At the time we didn't have any animals so I had it all to myself.

Money was tight but we got by. Mary had lived such a basic existence while I was in prison that we had a to build a lot of family infrastructure, but we slowly began to make headway. I did a lot technical hardware and operating system work, mostly jobs that took less than three hours. I did some web site programming, but no real programming. I didn't really want to go back into programming because I had missed so much of the advances and because I will always equate programming jobs with travel. I was not willing to spend time away from home so I decided to not even consider programming.

At some point it occurred to me that I could make money on the Y2K thing, so I started doing what I called a "Y2K Audit." After I started this I learned that some insurance companies were requiring business to get such an audit so I moved into that arena. The Y2K audit started with the companies computer and software, but also included things like their phone system, copier, fax, and alarm system. It was in doing one of these audits that I meet a large tool and die customer in Erie Pennsylvania (about 90 miles form home) with an interesting programming need. While auditing their existing software for Y2K problems the customer kept mentioning how poor their software was and that were there anything else in the industry available they would buy it, but nothing was available. This led to their hiring me to travel to a tool and die industry show in Detroit to see if anything was available to meet their needs.

The last time I'd been to Detroit I had been arrested at a coin show there, so for this trade show I decided to take my son Clay with me. Clay had just turned 16 and was eagerly learning the computer business so he was excited about the opportunity. It was an insiders only show so my customer had arranged two passes for me, but when we got there I spotted a sign that read, "Must be 21 years-old to attend." There was no way Clay could pass for 21, nor was there a chance I'd leave him alone in Detroit, so I got creative. I had Clay wait in the lobby while I went to one registration desk and received my reserved pass as Clay Waagner, Jr.. I took that pass to Clay then went to a different desk and picked up my pass as Clay Waagner, Sr.. I had to show my driver's licenses both times, but as my license list neither jr. or sr. it was a simple deception. During the show every time someone commented on Clay's youth I responded with something about youthful genius or computer prodigy. By the time we left everyone had noticed him, some would point when he walked by. Clay got a kick out of it. It was funny.

Since there was no industry software for a tool and die operator I saw it as a good vertical market to sell to. Violating my earlier plan of eschewing programming and travel I took on the job of writing the software. I didn't have to convince the customer to let me do the job as they worked hard to convince me to take the job. I took it on as a contractor. They would pay me $1,000 dollars a week to design and write the program and when it was done I would own the full rights to it and could resale it as I wanted. It was a good deal for both of us. I traveled to Erie to visit the customer once or twice a week, but did the bulk of the work from my barn/office.