Falling Into a Job

In 1958 I was working at General Electric in Schenectady, New York as a lab assistance in the turbine department. I had been with General Electric for eleven years. GE was going through financial problems and I was bumped from my job by an individual who was a 25-year employee.

I was sent to the employment office to see whether I could fit into another job that might be available. "There's a person in Building 10 who needs a computer programmer," the human resources person stated. "Do you think you could do this kind of work?" I said yes because I had been using a Friden calculator located on my desk and I thought this was a computer. An appointment was made to interview for the job.

In Building 10, I met with a Mr. Riley. He said that he had been looking for a computer programmer for a long time and was happy to see me. I was surprised at his enthusiasm since I thought operating a Friden was only a small part of the job I had been doing with the turbine department. He described the problem that had to be solved. It had to do with military aircraft flying at great speed and tossing bombs at the enemy. I had some trig and physics knowledge and felt that I could this, and said so. Mr. Riley hired me and told me to report in a couple of weeks.

I told my supervisor that I was going to be a computer programmer and he seemed surprised but did not say anything. I did review the Friden manual to make sure there were no tricks in there that I had missed. I retrieved my high school book of math tables. Such was my naivete.

On the appointed starting date, I met with Mr. Riley and he suggested we go see the computer at the computer center. When we arrived, we entered a large room where there was a young woman working with several machines. She was mounting large tapes on some machines and taking some off on others. From time to time she'd walk to a console and type something on a keyboard.

"What do you think of all this?" Mr. Riley asked me.

"We're living in world of great technological innovations," I opined.

"Are we going to go see the computer I'll be working on?" I asked, thinking that Mr. Riley would escort me to a small room where there was a Friden on a desk waiting for my arrival.

Mr. Riley's eyes glistened (he wore contacts) as he stared at me not comprehending. Then he began to laugh and said, "Friend, we're going to get along real well. I love a person with a sense of humor."

I was dumbfounded when I realized that Mr. Riley expected me to know something about what the young woman was doing. I was getting ready to confess that I knew nothing about these kinds of machines, when he added,"I'm going to take a trip to a branch office beginning this afternoon. You can work on the problem while I'm gone and we can discuss your progress when I get back."

I mumbled something and the rest of the morning became lost in the obscurity of history.

After Mr. Riley had left, I visited the manager of the computer center and told him that I was going to be working with the computer in this center and needed to learn all about it. When I explained my predicament, he agreed to assign a computer programmer to teach me about how to program a computer.

During the following week, I met with a woman named June. It was then that I understood what a computer was and what it meant to program one. When Mr. Riley returned from his trip, I was not ready to program but knew the buzz words.

"How is the program coming?" he asked.

"Great, I responded. I'm loading the A Register with binary bits and shifting them to the right and left and then loading the Q Register with the ones I need."

"Oh never mind with the details," he responded. "Carry on!"

Somehow it worked out. Mr. Riley never learned that I had known nothing about computers when he hired me. I developed the program he needed, then taught others he hired about how the computer worked.

I think there may be a bit of wisdom here but I don't know exactly what it is.