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They did the security clearance investigation though and so one fine day about six months later the OIC of the personnel office I was working in got a letter informing him that my TS/SCI clearance had been approved. He asked me what it was about and I guessed that it was because of the paperwork snafu.

TS means Top Secret, and SCI is Sensitive Compartmented Information. Pretty serious stuff. So I'm in a personnel office at a base in the UK, and the head of personnel is a major who's got a shot at promotion to lieutenant colonel, and I got to do a lot of interesting things because of my security clearance. Sometimes operating the AV equipment at high-level classified meetings, I was volunteered for embassy duty a couple of times, and some courier assignments. I was regularly sent to sit in for the secretary of the base commander and sometimes the wing commander - not because the security clearance was needed but it kept the major in the minds to the higher-ups. The promotion thing.

I traveled around Europe a lot, had a good time and learned pretty good French, German and Italian (enough to manage food, lodging, transportation and such) and with just over a year left on my enlistment was reassigned to a base in California. That went by too quickly, and I was tempted to stay in. I made Staff Sergeant at my first eligibility and the way things were going I could coast for another sixteen years, retire at just over forty with a fairly nice pension and health care benefits and still have time to work at something more lucrative.

But I was young and wanted to try something else. I had worked at a local bank briefly before I enlisted and while on business there learned that they were preparing to install their own computer system. It was a big thing in the early 1980s for small banks, and very expensive. The microprocessor revolution was just getting started and business computers were mainframes and at the low end minicomputers the size of a refrigerator, and for a small bank like this one the entry cost was over a million dollars. They invited me to come back to work and I accepted the offer.

I had found that my facility with languages was not limited to human languages and quickly learned the tools of the trade in those days. COBOL was the primary business language then - I had some contact with it while in the Air Force - and found it and other languages easy to learn and apply. I would work there for a few years, during which time the first of the micro-based systems became available. The software company we used was one of the more forward-thinking and was the first to adopt a Unix-based system for that environment. I remained there for a couple of years after we converted to it and then went to work for the software developer.

I would spend the next six years there, assisting in the transition from proprietary systems to Unix and doing a lot of traveling around the country for site surveys, installations and conversions, and customer relations visits. Our staff was small compared to most of our larger competitors, being unencumbered by the bureaucracy that grows as the company does most of the time and the fact that our people were at a minimum two or three times as productive. That was not only our reputation but was reflected in the financial records. Unfortunately least capable of the three partners (a salesman - the other two were programmers) managed to leverage a loan to buy them out, something that wouldn't have happened but for the incompetence of the bank itself (it was in the process of being acquired so there's that) and he ended up being the sole owner of an operation he was completely incapable of running. Allowing his family and friends to blow most of the borrowed money while the company was falling apart didn't help, and that lasted about two years.

Fortunately a somewhat more competent company had licensed the code to produce a clone and were unaffected by the collapse. They recruited three key personnel from those left to work for them, as they ended up with most of the customers. I worked for them another two years while the tech world went from the proprietary systems to commodity hardware and (largely) software, and decided to look around for something else.

This was about 1995 or so and I found a company close to home that needed a Unix systems administrator. That was the usual job title for what I was doing, but as a rule unless you were in a large company you were more of a developer (what we used to call a programmer) and systems engineer. I could leave strictly coding issues to the developers but pretty much everything else was going to be at least partly my problem. So I was the go-to guy for about everything. They had inherited the product from a failing company (sound familiar?) and I had plenty of work to do getting it on an even keel. I created a documentation system on the company intranet, complete with a wiki for the customer service department to use. The wiki had just been invented and was a rather new thing, and my work proved useful in improving customer service and reducing costs. Over the next eight years or so my department carried its workload with no added staff while the customer service side nearly doubled.



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