From: ckd@eff.org (Christopher Davis)
Subject: lurk, lurk, lurk, post, lurk...
Organization: Electronic Frontier Foundation Tech Central
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 12:30:22 GMT

A young (twenty-two's not OLD, not yet anyway), bearded (though it could
use a trim) brown-haired man enters the Place.  A few old-timers wonder
whether they recognize him or not; he *does* look kind of familiar...

``I haven't been in the net.Place for a while, oh, years now.  Been too
busy with work, life, work, stuff like that.  You know the drill.  When
last I visited I was still a student at Boston U, unsure where I was
going to go when I graduated, very much at loose ends.  Things have
changed, yet they haven't... so much has happened.

``I graduated, though it looked a bit unsure there; they'd gotten
confused about my AP credits.  Got that fixed, though.  Senior year was
pretty bizarre, so I didn't get around to interviewing much... and near
the end of the year I met my now-fiancee' at a net.get-together.

``What with all that I wound up graduating with no real plans on where
to live or what to do.  We (Helen and I) managed to arrange a sublet for
the summer along with some friends of ours, and I kept on working in one
of the computer labs on campus.  She got a job at MIT, and we scraped
by.  Scraped was the operative word here; rice and noodles time.  I
moved on to a full-time job doing JCL programming, the bane of the
computing world, but it paid the rent on the place we moved to after the
summer.  Not that it did much more; rice & noodles again.

``I had been looking for a new job in what spare time I had from the
commute out to the suburbs (an hour or more each way).  Not much luck,
of course, with that kind of schedule.  Then I lost my job; I had a bad
habit of finishing my work early, disliking the dress code, that sort of
thing.  However, that gave me a month of severance pay, which quitting
wouldn't have (not that I hadn't been planning on quitting :), so things
were okay.  Not great, but okay.

``Well, I left my old job on Thursday.  The very next week I saw an ad,
on the net, for a Sun/Mac system & network type.  Talk about tailor-made
jobs!  Even better, it was for a good cause (EFF); I'd been following
their activities since before they were founded, since I'd always been
interested in computers and networks.  I sent my resume in and got an
interview set up; they were skeptical about my experience level, since I
hadn't actually administered a Unix system yet.  So I wound up on a
month's "consulting" as a test.  Two weeks later I was hired.

``I hadn't even used up my severance pay; we used that to pay off some
bills.  Things had definitely turned around, though.  Now we both work
at EFF--the job's a two-person task, and we work together well,
complementing each other's skills--and life's good, if quite busy.

``In a very interesting bit of "small-world"-ism, Steve Jackson Games
has released a _Callahan's_ sourcebook, which even (of course) mentions
the net.place.  Note that SJG was the game company nearly sent out of
business by the Secret Service, in an event that helped cause the
formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation--and therefore my job.

``Life's like that sometimes.

``I'll probably remain lurking as time permits; my online time is
certainly not metered, but my total time is.  I've had to practically
use a machete on my .newsrc, and I have quite a few groups I *have* to
read for my job...but I'll try to make time when I can.''

He wanders off into the shadows, finding either a corner or a door;
nobody's really sure which (including him)...
--
Christopher K. Davis      |       NET.INSIGHTS INTO ARTISTIC CRITICISM:
<ckd@eff.org>   EFF #14   | ``[Y]ou don't cure bad art by locking it all up
System Administrator, EFF | in one museum, you cure it by throwing tomatoes
+1 617 864 0665  [CKD1]   | at bad artists.'' --Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com>