I worked at Inforonics (my first stretch there) from March 1987 to January 1993, just about six years. It was a very small, very informal company in a building (550 Newtown Road in Littleton MA) that used to be the Littleton Bowl-Mor and they still had a welcome mat in the front lobby saying that. But I'd always go in the back door through the garage and up the rickety stairs to the second floor. When I first interviewed there they told me to drive around to the back parking lot and look for the "Inforonics" sign, which was hand-lettered in pencil on a board nailed over the door.
I guess they liked me at the interview, can’t remember if I had a second one. They offered me the job for somewhere around $22K, which was not as much as I'd hoped for with a graduate degree, but significantly more than the @$16K I was getting from Tufts. I was still commuting down to Kingston for a course that would get me the last credits needed for my degree at the time. The course was taught by the new Director of the program. I told her excitedly about my new job and she blew up! She demanded that I go back there and insist on being paid more, which I sheepishly told her I might do but actually didn't. I liked her and liked her reaction ... I've always felt that I was worth more than they were paying me in every job I've had, and perhaps part of it was that bit of confidence she gave me at the end of graduate school. I was an (almost) straight-A student and the Library School was proud of me.
Dress at Inforonics was *very* informal; I used to explain to people that if your blue jeans didn't have holes in them you were dressed up in my office. When I first started working there I'd drive my baby-blue Ford Pinto station wagon out route 2 from Cambridge to Littleton, and soon advanced to my white Chevrolet Citation II. This was my first introduction to a small, flat organization, there weren’t myriad layers of management as there had been at Tufts. The company's big bosses were just down the hall when I needed to talk. Everyone liked president/owner Larry Buckland, but most people were scared of the gruff general manager, who was actually a nice guy too.
When I think back on Inforonics in the 80s, it seems like another world. People smoked cigarettes indoors back then, and many meetings featured an overflowing ashtray at the center of the table. The furniture must have dated from WWII, metal desks and squeaky chairs with cracked vinyl upholstery. Most of the staff were divided up two per office, which were cold in the Winter and hot in the Summer, even with the aged window-unit air conditioners cranked and screeching. The exterminators came through periodically.
This was a much different place from Tufts and they concentrated on doing everything as cheaply as possible, many of the employees didn’t have college degrees. We all brought our lunches and ate them at the same time in our kitchen, where the table was usually covered with gossip tabloids that we all made fun of. Most of the people there were from Central Massachusetts or Southern New Hampshire. I was the exotic, living in the big city of Cambridge, having a graduate degree, and being a little older than the average.
My start there was painful, as were some of my later experiences there. They needed a programmer to deal with library clients, and they figured it would be cheaper to teach a librarian to become a programmer than vice versa. I was taught some rudiments of programming, such as computer indexing, but learning this job was being thrown into the deep end, and I mean VERY deep. They threw a bunch of code from my predecessor at me, and expected me to figure it out and do better. I remember driving home to our apartment in Cambridge almost in tears at how hard it was to learn this new trade, and being afraid that I'd fail.
Our business consisted of two products: computer type-setting and library services. We "setup programmers" either worked with customers directly (I did) or got specs from managers and wrote code in our proprietary language. When I started there we all crowded into one room (with many overflowing ashtrays) and worked on dumb terminals that connected over phone lines to a mainframe located at the Boston Public Library. This was old school. We would call them up and ask them to switch disk cores in the dishwasher-sized memory units the mainframe drove. Later we all got terminals on our offices that were hooked up to a brand-new 286 running UNIX.
Though my start was so rocky and though there were some very hard-to-work-with people at Inforonics in the late 80s, I was on top of the world when I finally was able to make sense out of the code I inherited, and to start improving it. I actually was as smart as I'd been told in graduate school! And the customers I worked with were great too. I did a database of the BPL's Joan of Arc collection of documents and realia. A huge project of mine was to program an interface and database enabling small libraries to catalog materials in MARC format on their own UNIX systems. I demoed this on my first real business trip to an archivists' convention in Philadelphia down the street from Independence Hall. They loved it but I don't think we actually sold very many.
How did I learn what I did? At Tufts, we’d relied on computer storing, searching, and editing of library data enabled by OCLC. And this was very user-friendly, I picked it up quickly. It used the MARC cataloging format (that our president had invented), and so I was very familiar with that (a big part of why Inforonics was eager to hire me). I’ve touched on how I picked up programming, and a key thing was that I tried to continue to learn. I would read manuals about the UNIX operating system and think, how can I set up a little experiment to see if it does this or that when I do this? I found programming fascinating and exciting. In some ways it was the opposite of intellectualism, it was so absolute and concise.
Towards the end of my time there I took courses in C and in UNIX Administration at Northeastern University’s Burlington campus. The courses were introductory and didn’t go very deep, but they were enough to push my mind along to understanding concepts of programming and managing computers. Some of these concepts, like constants, functions, arrays, expressions, and operators, could be mapped to what I’d learned in math courses long ago. And principles of programming flow, like loops and if/then statements, were akin to what I’d learned about navigation as a cab driver. It all made me realize that this was not a dark science, programming was never mysterious to me after that.
A delightful thing about working at 550 Newtown Road, was that we were at the edge of undeveloped woods, there was a path into the woods from our lower parking lot, and at the end of the path was a cove of Fort Pond. I kept a fishing rod in the car, sometimes would go down there to fish and relax at lunch time.
On another note, I came to the realization during my time there, that there were some people in the world I could not get along with. Up until that time, part of my faith in the world had been that I could get along with anyone. It was just a matter of finding the right topic of conversation or the right activity for a person who seemed like an asshole to change into a person I could relate to. But some of my experiences at that job forced me to admit that I was wrong, that some people were just assholes and there was nothing I could do about it.
I didn’t do very well working with assholes, but I learned from that too. I could have picked my battles better, but I learned to stand up for myself and to have a thick skin. I was not just a commodity, I was a valuable teammate and I had opinions that people (sometimes very grudgingly) would go along with when they were good enough. We were doing really new stuff at Inforonics, not just continuing a trade that dated from long ago. I was developing and using skills that hadn’t been invented when I was in school.
But by later 1992, some things were changing for Inforonics' business plan. Computers were rapidly becoming more ubiquitous, and to hire a third-party to provide computer services that you could do yourself with desktop publishing programs was a rapidly disappearing niche. Libraries were flocking to turnkey integrated systems that could display MARC cataloging records for users, also integrate with circulation and acquisition modules, and also provide an OPAC that their users could search. In retrospect I can cite the business realities we were facing, but I didn't realize them then. I was a liberal arts guy, a librarian, and an academician who had never been introduced to some hard facts about how money gets made, until this changed.
Three major life landmarks happened to me during my time at Inforonics. We moved from renting in Cambridge to being home-owners in Woburn in 1988, where we still live. Some of our first visitors were my parents of course, and my Mom planted a spruce tree from Maine in our back yard. Unfortunately, that Winter Mom got the word that she was dying of cancer, and she passed away in June 1989. This was an incredible blow to me and all my loved ones, and what made it worse was realizing that I was still young (33) and would be living with this trauma for a long time. And then in August 1991, we were blessed with our son, David, and I hope to live with that blessing forever.
So anyway, there I was being naïve again between Christmas and New Year's in late 1992. I was working from home for two days a week to tend to our 16-month old toddler. This was very unusual for a guy at that time, and trying to work from home was not going well. Our GM called me into his office on December 30th, sat me down at the side of his big desk, and tried to break it to me gently. Inforonics couldn't afford to employ me any longer. I was welcome to come into the office and use the copiers and phones and computers for a few months while looking for my next job, but they couldn't pay me any longer and it was time to move on.
I was stunned. I had never thought about people actually getting laid off, least of all me! They were shutting down the whole library services part of the business and several others were laid off at the same time.
Though there was friction at Inforonics, I’d come to love working there. The company took us all out to a French restaurant for a Christmas party every year. And at my first one in 1987, we were all handed envelopes. I opened mine and it contained a 2-week Christmas bonus! I was so touched by that; I'd never gotten a Christmas bonus, I thought it was something that used to happen in the old days and here it was right in my hands. We sure could use the cash back then. More hand-writing on the wall that I should have seen was that soon the Christmas bonuses were just one week of pay, then half a week, then disappeared. On my last Christmas there we didn't even have a party, though our wonderful president went around the office and wished everyone a merry Christmas individually.
So how did one look for a job, especially when it meant we'd have to find a different child care arrangement and the economy was still acting sluggish from the early 90s recession? Well, what you had to do back then was look in the want ads in the paper and on bulletin boards, which was where I'd found out about the Inforonics job. And what was I? Was I still a librarian or was I a programmer, or was I totally useless? Ever since that personal crisis I've sympathized a lot with people who are out of work, which does quite a whammy on your self-confidence.
I'd gotten some solid raises while at Inforonics, and I had now broken the $30K/year barrier (barely), but we sat down and did the math and realized I had to bring in at least $34K if we had to pay for day care. Things were not looking up. But good things happen sometimes, and after a month or so I saw an ad in the Boston Globe for ...
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