Yesterday was another sort of a holiday day. I went out to Kanata to see W.

W was first met toward the end of last year. He operates a company in a tech field and was looking for someone to assist him. I was doing mundane routine volunteer work and I felt ready to make the jump to something more occupationally oriented. My experience in coding and IT goes back almost 40 years. Like some lost dinosaur memory, I knew the early history of the technology he sold, and supported. All of my experience from working with Gargantua seemed to apply. The work appeared to be an ideal fit with my background and skills. The opportunity represented a positive way of easing myself back into the world of paid work.

Unfortunately, reality failed to conform with intended practice. Despite having a strong IT background (formal university training in coding: PL1 on a time shared IBM 360 with punch card program and data input. Later work on an IBM Typesetter, a unit the size of a telephone booth placed on its side with all program and data entry via 8 level paper TTL tape. I remember scuttling around with the boot-loader tape kept safe and handy in a clean pocket. There was no visual interface on the Typesetter, no way to tell what, or how, it was performing. If it appeared to be on the fritz and became non-responsive, it was simply rebooted to get it back on-line. The boot-loader tape needed to be run at a specified point in start-up to bring the machine back to a functional state. Fond memories. But I digress.).

I found myself totally overwhelmed by all aspects of W’s IT environment. This was very disconcerting. I attempted to conceal my difficulties, to avoid admitting them to myself, or to W. Perhaps if I didn’t acknowledge my problems, they would simply dissolve. But I found it increasingly difficult to understand what was taking place and became completely disoriented.

I should have realized the nature of this difficulty much earlier. After the accident, I uncovered in my home library an entire series of training manuals with technical data and schematics for some of Gargantua’s more spectacular product failures. Thick as the Manhattan phone book, these documents spanned several feet of two inch thick oak shelving which was needed to support their weight. But I was unable to read any of them. It was like attempting to read hieroglyphics. I could tell that a page concerned a certain topic but I had zero ability to understand exactly what it detailed, or to make sense of it all. And these were products and technical data that I had fully mastered and which I had gleefully supported with great facility prior to the accident. All of this prior accumulation of IT knowledge and skill appeared to have somehow abandoned me.

What was once present was now gone. Totally gone. Disappeared.

 
Something tired this way comes.