To this day, it seems so bizarre. How was it that for well over a year of my life, I found myself living on the other side of the world?
In the Fall of 1990, I was working as a Data Center Operator for an seismic data service company. It was not exactly something I had planned on doing. I had originally hoped to work as an engineer, but I could not handle the higher level math courses in college. A slumping grade point average resulted from trying to take a calculus course several times and not passing. This is turn led me to make the decision to drop out of college all together.
All of this was a very depressing experience, one I don't think I've ever gotten over. When I was a kid, I was extremely good at math at school. Math had always been fairly easy. This all changed as I went further and further in high school because I found myself having to work harder and harder to master material. I still found it all manageable, but the grind of school as a teenager made me sick of school altogether.
I decided to not go to college once I got out of high school. I had no idea of what I wanted to do and it seemed pointless to spend lots of time going to classes that were going to be of no use once I got out into "the real world". To this day, I wonder whether I should have done some military service. If I were to have done such a thing, I should have done it when I was just out of school - while I was still young, naive, and filled with hope and optimism.
So it was that I took a number of menial jobs after I got out of high school and promptly drifted along with the flow. I worked for a franchisee of a major fast food chain, as an apprentice electrician, did a bit of clerical work for a friend's construction company. I learned little and found little to inspire me.
I finally decided that I wasn't going anywhere and everyone in my family (particularly my father, who seems to love keeping score more than anything else in life) was shaming me that I wasn't running going to college and that I was falling behind in not keeping up with the Joneses. I made the fatal plunge and decided to go back to school.
What I found was that when I went back to school, it wasn't so much the math that I found interesting (math was the same grind it had become - only worse), it was history, political science, and so forth. As a boy, I loved reading the newspapers and keeping up with current events. I discovered in high school that few others did this and I felt like an oddball. However, when I went back to school, discovered that the world all seemed alive. The history was no longer names, dates, facts, and figures, but real people with real motives - it was real history. There was an actual study of government, and so on. To this day, I think I should have junked the study of engineering and stuck with the social sciences.
But this is now and that was then. It was when I was going through school that I discovered a job at an oil and gas company for a tape librarian job. They were looking for an undergraduate student in computer science or engineering. The pay was $6.50 per hour, 40 hours per week and came with no benefits. Technically I was a contract employee. But the job was indoors and unlike my other jobs, not too physically or emotionally stressful.
This situation was okay as long as I was in school, but my troubles in math led to dropping out. Things were different and I was now well into my twenties. It was no longer acceptable to me to be struggling along like this.
A friend of mine who had graduated with a degree in physics had landed a job with a seismic data firm. After about a year, he told me that they needed an operator to work the evening hours in their data center. I applied for the job in December 1989 and was started work the day after Christmas.
I soon discovered why there was an opening for the job. I found myself working in what could only be described as a kind of cartoon like world, where all of my immediate co-workers were caricatures of real people. One of my co-workers was a long haired wannabe guitar player named James. He seemed like he should have been in Los Angeles or Hollywood rather than in Houston. Another was a woman in her 30's named Debbie. She often seemed like she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A third was a young college dropout named Marvin who enjoyed working outdoors rather than indoors. There was also a young guy who was just about to finish college named Alvin. Alvin was high strung and who often whined about (and ratted on) his co-workers. And who did Alvin complain to? Our supervisory personnel of course.
Ah, our men in charge... And how shall I remember them? Not kindly of course. I've had many bosses in my life, but none of them come close to being like the three I had to deal with at the Seismic services company.
First there was my supervisor, Juan. Power mad, two faced, a man who played favorites, who constantly walked off the job and didn't think anything wrong with any of it. One guy called him El Presidente.
Then there was Juan's favorite sycophant, Cliff. Cliff had been an operator for about 12 years and still did not know anything about mainframes or computing. That of course matter that much. Cliff's favorite things to do at work were to talk on the phone all evening, while we busted our rear ends off keeping up with work. The other was going out to get dinner and tipping a few beers back before coming back with the food. Either of these acts would have gotten most of the rest of us fired in a hurry. But Cliff was a toady of Juan's, so all was forgiven.
But the man who truly made life a nightmare was Matt. Ah, Matt...
Matt had been with the company for about 15 - 16 years when I joined. Tall, in his late 30's, about 6 feet 5 inches and rather thin, Matt was bald and had yellowed fingertips from chain smoking Camel cigarettes. But what got to people about Matt was his personality.
I have met a lot of people in my life and nobody has ever come close to being like Matt. Matt was nothing less than a freak show. On my first day at work, Matt introduced himself and went off to do something else. Within 3 hours, he had hurled 2 cut downs or insults at me. At first, I didn't know what to do. It was my first day on the job and everything was becoming surreal so fast. But I found out that this was something I was going to have to deal with 5-6 times a day, every day. So did everyone else.
Whenever an opportunity arose for Matt to taunt someone or cut someone down, you could bet your last dollar he would do it. Sometimes the very way he spoke to you would change in mid sentence. Other times, it was that Matt would not defend you against Juan or Cliff. He also had a bizarre way of constantly eroding your confidence in yourself that you were doing your job properly. This guy was maddening. All of this combined to elevate your blood pressure and make Matt someone whom you wanted to beat the crap out of all the time.
Needless to say, morale was always low and turnover at the shop was very high. In the first year I worked there, 6 people quit and 5 more asked to be transferred to other buildings or shifts - an average turnover of an employee every 5 weeks or so. We never got the chance to learn anything important such as how to handle tape or disk control units, reset the mainframe itself, or how to recover from more exotic problems that arose in mainframe environments. All we ever did was hang tapes, roll up plots, and put print out away. Meanwhile, we were constantly told (especially by Cliff - of all people) that we needed to show lots and lots of initiative. Not only that, but we had to train all of the new people these guys had run off. So the job was not only needlessly stressful, but also completely a dead end job. The pay was poor, $1200 per month, with health insurance and a 401-k plan and profit sharing, but it's hard to save money when your living paycheck to paycheck.
That first year, 1990, hardly a week went by when I didn't think about quitting. I quickly noticed that I was taking my work home with me. Spikes of memory would erupt in my mind recalling Matt's latest cut downs, Juan's latest threats to my job, and so on. The job was never far from my mind, even away from work. We would gather in the parking lot after work and all bitch at each other for 2-3 hours about what had happened that day. It was all becoming one long surreal nightmare.
Such was my world as it was, when in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I saw and felt the country get (partially) mobilized for war, and like so many others, I thought about signing up for military service. I was 24, a college dropout, but in top shape from running big miles. I had a girlfriend at the time and both she and my mother went mad over the idea. I also thought about the war itself. What were we really fighting for? I was still young and patriotic, but what was this all about? Were we really fighting over oil? Did Saddam Hussein really have nuclear weapons? If the war was really over oil, why should I potentially have to give my life over something such as petroleum? On the other hand, military service would allow me to get out of the job nightmare I was in. I could have a chance to see the world, perhaps. Maybe it would be a chance to start over.
Such as it was, I dithered as the crisis continued. But out of the blue, another opportunity arose, completely unforeseen and out of nowhere.
In December 1990, a notice was posted on a board in the Data Center declaring that there was a job opening in the Hebei Province of the People's Republic of China. An operator was needed to go to China because one operator, named Dave Weingart, who had been been there for 5 years, was coming back to the United States. It turned out that the company had contracts to do consulting work with the Chinese petroleum exploration bureaus and had been doing so since 1983. It was thought that the replacement would be need to be ready by March 1991. The notice stated that anyone who wanted to go would need to sign their name to the notice below.
When I saw this posting, couldn't believe it. China??? Suddenly my mind was racing. What a shock! I knew the company had data centers and ships all over the world, but I always thought it was programmers and geophysical interpreters who got to go to these far off places, not operators. The job posting said that the operator needed one year of "console" experience. I had that, so why not? Later that evening, I put my name down and signed up.
What happened? Well, nothing. Depressingly, the weeks went by. The Persian Gulf war was initiated after a bombing campaign of several weeks. Although I was a bit depressed that I did not sign up for military service, I was heartened that the Allied powers gained control of the air. I publicly told my co-workers that we would be in Baghdad in 6 weeks to 2 months at most. Little did I or anyone else realize the war would be over in 4 days, although the decision was made not to march into Iraq.
Meanwhile back home, I timidly asked Matt if anything had become of the China job prospect. After the obligatory insult, he agreed to talk to Don, the manager of our department. Don had hired me in the first place and had not said a word to me since. He came by curtly informed me that, "I didn't know enough to do the job".
I was struck down. How could it be that I didn't know enough to do the job? Didn't the job description say that one year of "console experience" was needed? I had been working "console" for most of the past year. I knew the job up and down...
Such as it was, fate intervened anyway. In late February 1991, I reported for work as usual one afternoon, when Josh, an assistant manager who worked with Don, approached me with Don in the background. Josh asked me if I was still interested in going to China. They said that they would need an answer, preferably now, since time was running very short. Again, I couldn't believe it. I said I was 95 percent sure, but give me one day and I will have a definite answer.
I asked one of my closest friends, an old friend named Steve Moore, what I should do and he said I had nothing holding me back here. Why not? He said he would if he were in my shoes. That sealed it. As a favor, I sold him my car for a cut rate since he needed one. My father offered to by the car, but he had enough money.
Now, with the decision made to go, I had about one month to get my affairs in order before I was to go abroad. I drew up a will in case something happened to me. I handled to sale of the car to Steve. I read as much as I could about China before I went, so I would not be entirely surprised before I went. I also taped as much of my record collection as I could before I went, to help me through those boring times we all go through.
I also had an interview with the company's manager of foreign contracts before I went. His name was Fred Carney, a dark haired (what was left of it) 40'ish man who wore glasses and gave you the creepy feeling that your were not talking to someone in charge of foreign contracts, but to a used car salesman. Fred sized me up, asking me what was my motives for going and I told him. I was going nowhere and I had no money. Fred told me that the post was for 2 years. He asked me if could I handle that? I said I could. He told me that there was a 40 percent "hardship" post pay hike for working there and that I would not have to pay taxes for 5 years as long as I stayed out of the United States for 330 days per year. I didn't tell Fred that I knew of this because my friend Jason had already told me of this. He had thought of going to Venezuela and had researched these issues.
Fred told me that the location of the data center was in Zhouxian, a small city about 45 miles southwest of Beijing. I asked him why operators were needed to go to China. Fred told me that operators were needed because the CoCom and Department of Defense insisted on it before they would okay contracts between the company and the Chinese. I would learn more about this later. Fred told me that a bus went to Beijing once a week and that many Western goods would not be available. Fred suggested that I stock up on things I liked before I left. With that, his secretary asked me if I had a passport. I said no. That was another issue that had to be solved, and in a real hurry. That was because the Chinese consulate was, for all the obvious reasons, not very efficient with dealing with visas and passports.
Time ran quickly and I was busy day and night. I took 7 days of vacation before I left because I needed time to handle all of these things before I left. But come a March morning in 1991, I left Houston Texas on a United Airlines Flight for a 9,000 mile flight to a country on the other side of the world ...