After my Sophomore year at O.I.T. I took a job for a year at Microsoft doing product support for MS-DOS, and Microsoft Windows programming. So, if you called for DOS questions between July 1989 and August 1990 and heard "Microsoft DOS support, this is Patrick. How may I help you?" then you were talking to me.

I was at Microsoft when they implemented the 900 number for DOS support, in fact since I was the senior tech at the time, I was given the 'honor' if you will of answering the first 900 call. Of course there were problems implementing the new system, and the first poor bastard who called the 900 number had to wait for over 20 minutes (at $2/min) before they could connect him to me. He was calling from his workplace, so he didn't really care that the phone charges for the call would probably exceed $50.

Amusing Microsoft stories coming...

I was very fortunate to land an internship position at the NASA Ames Research Center during the summer between my Junior and Senior years at the Oregon Institute of Technology. Furthermore I was even luckier to have been selected to work on the "Cobra" project. If you click on the helicopter you can read some data concerning the current project that this helicopter is being used for.

The part of the Cobra project I was involved in was with researching a programmable symbology generator. This Cobra helicopter was modified and fitted with the pilot night vision system (P.N.V.S.) from an Apache helicopter. A P.N.V.S. is basically an infrared camera that is slaved to the pilot's head movements, wherever the pilot looks, the camera looks. In front of the pilot's eye is a small screen, onto which this infra-red image is displayed. Over the top of the infrared image various 'symbologies' are displayed, like altitude, air speed, artificial horizon, center of view etc.

These symbols are created from a 'black box', and takes the manufactures up to 6 months to modify the appearance of the symbols being displayed. I was assigned the task of determining if PC technology of the time would be fast enough to translate the data and create the symbols on the display in real-time. If it was determined that PC technology was fast enough I was then to begin development of a symbology generation system with an emphasis on ease of symbology modification. They wanted to be able to easily modify the appearance of the symbols to determine the most efficient appearance and organization.

It was decided that it would be feasible to place a suped-up PC inside the tail section of the helicopter to handle the processing of the data and symbols. Now they needed somebody to start working on it. I pretty much begged to be that person. The powers that be must have gotten sick of me begging, as they finally agreed to let me continue my work upon returning to Oregon for my final year of college. So, that is how I ended up doing my senior-project for NASA.

One important life-lesson that I learned at NASA was that there is more to life than work. While I was at Microsoft, I, like most everybody I knew, was at work pretty much 7 days a week. NASA is a government agency, thus it was basically a government job. I was still under the mind-numbing effect of Microsoft when I decided to go into work on the 4th of July - everybody thought I was crazy.

While at NASA, I lived with 3 very different and very interesting guys who happened to be renting a house from one of my college professors. They are the ones who undertook the huge task of trying to teach me to relax and have fun. They took me everywhere, we went body-boarding in Santa Cruz, drinking in San Jose, river rafting on the Sacramento River and sight seeing in Yosemite. Was probably one of the best summers of my life.

Was also a real eye opening summer for me. People that come from a small town in rural Oregon, tend to be somewhat shell I say sheltered and conservative. Please keep that in mind as you read the following story:

I decided to take a day off from work and go body boarding in Santa Cruz with a friend. Upon reaching Santa Cruz, we discovered that there were no waves to be found. The ocean was flat.

"Never fear," my friend says, "I know a place just North of here that always has waves, it's called ABC beach." "Kewl!", I replied, and I started driving North. When we arrived my friend had this grin on his face that I remember to this day, at the time, I didn't know why he was grinning, but I soon found out.

It was almost a mile from the road to the beach. I could see some people surfing and others simply walking along the beach. As we walked along, I was looking forward to getting in the water and wasn't paying too much attention to what was going on around me. So, you can imagine my surprise when I looked up to see a man sitting to the side of the trail who was completely stark naked!

"Oh", my friend said, "did I forget to mention that is a nude, gay beach?". That is when I took a good look around me at all the naked men walking around the beach. After regaining my composure, I explained to him that to my knowledge, we don't have places like that in Oregon.

I don't consider myself homophobic, or whatever the current politically correct term is. However, as I said, I come from a small rural community in Oregon, where I am sure homosexual people exist, however, they are not public about it. So, it was quite a surprise to me.

I ended up having a great time body boarding with my friend, though I will say, I didn't take off my wet-suit the whole time.

Amusing NASA stories coming...

Remember this company? Alas it is no more, it was swallowed up by the mighty Semantec Corporation.

This was my first job out of college and what an interesting learning experience it was. I arrived just in time for the chaos surrounding the release of PC-Tools V8.0. I was given the infamous 'Wipe' program to work on. Wipe is a useful, yet nasty little program that will erase or 'wipe' data from your hard drive, making sure nobody can read it. If Oliver North had used this, he wouldn't have had so many troubles :-).

After having worked at Microsoft and the NASA, I had developed just a tiny bit of an attitude, thinking I was better than most of my peers, well if nothing else, working at CPS was a good experience in humility. Let me explain:

While working on Wipe, the evil little trolls that lived upstairs, called testers, found a bug in my program. Of course, having worked at Microsoft, I informed the evil trolls that they must have made a minor error, for there were no bugs in my program, only cool undocumented features.

Well, the evil trolls took control of my boss's brain and he ordered me to remove those cool undocumented features from my code. The evil trolls had won this round, I knew that it was futile to resist, so I set out to remove the cool undocumented features from Wipe.

Unable to reproduce the bug reported by the trolls that lived upstairs, I bravely journeyed to a place that programmers fear to tread, I entered the land of the evil trolls, I went to the "Test Lab" to seek out the obviously mentally impaired troll which had dared to enter a bug against my program.

Much to my surprise the evil troll had a name, it was Matt and he didn't appear to be evil at all, rather a very nice troll. No matter how nice he seemed, he was still a troll, so I remained cautious and suspicious. I explained to the troll named Matt that I was unable to reproduce the so-called bug that he had reported and that therefore I request that he rescind his blemish of a bug from my program's status.

At this point the troll named Matt grinned an evil grin, saying that he could reproduce it, and proceeded to reproduce it for me. I was completely thunderstruck, the troll named Matt was actually able to cast some evil spell on my program and make it behave in a way I had not predicted. However, he was only able to make this happen on two computers out of 300!

Next I pleaded my case to my boss, "This so-called bug that the evil trolls have found only occurs on less than 1% of all computers.", I logically explained. "I do not think it is a very important bug, the program can ship without this being fixed.", I further explained. My boss, obviously still under the spell of the evil trolls, didn't agree with me. "Hey.", I said, "That is what we did at Microsoft". "You're not in Microsoft anymore Toto.", was the last reply I got.

Sensing that I had run out of all other options, I made the decision to fix the insignificant little bug that only caused less than 1% of all computers to reboot. This turned out to be more difficult than I had anticipated, the target date for shipping PC-Tools V8.0 was rapidly approaching, we were down to counting hours! It was 9:00 at night when I entered my boss's office and explained to him that I was unable to find the cause of the bug.

My boss looked at me then picked up the phone and called a pitch hitter. "Gus.", he said, "Get in here in 15 minutes and I'll order a pizza for you." After a brief pause he added "OK, some beer too, just hurry up." After hanging up the phone, my boss told me that Gus was coming in to help me.

I had no idea who this Gus guy was, all I knew about him was that his office looked more like a cave than an office and that he drank coffee by the quart. When Gus came in, I offered to show him the source code for my program. "No need.", was all he said before getting to work.

I watched, amazed as he quickly installed a disassember and watched my program run in assembly language. Within 5 minutes he stopped, explaining to me that he had found the problem. After picking my gaping jaw from the floor I listened to his explanation. It seems that somewhere I was overwriting the memory associated with a network interrupt service routine.

"Impossible!" was my first thought, I couldn't be doing that. Then reason and logic began returning to my brain. I realized that I knew nothing and that I should be listening to this diety among programmers, that he, unlike me, actually knew what the hell he was doing.

I fixed the bug, ate pizza with Gus and my boss and learned a valuable lesson in humility. However, I always remained cautious and skeptical of the evil trolls that lived upstairs.

After Version 8 of PC-Tools shipped I was, for reasons God and my old boss only know, put in charge of the Central Point Software programs that were bundled with Microsoft MS-DOS V6.0x and IBM PC-DOS 6.0x. This turned out to be an interesting experience, I flew up to Seattle several times to work with Microsoft, usually looking up old friends and colleagues during my visits. I was, however, also sent to Florida off and on (mostly on) for the better part of 5 months to work on integrating the Central Point Software programs into IBM's PC-DOS.

Thus ends this chapter of my work history, hope you found it amusing.

I didn't actually work for IBM. Rather I was kind of 'loaned' to IBM by my company at the time, Central Point Software.

I commuted back and forth between Boca Raton, Florida and Portland, Oregon for the better part of 5 months. I was in put in charge of integrating a number of CPS utilities into IBM PC DOS 6.01. Among the utilities integrated into IBM PC DOS 6.01 were Backup and Undelete (DOS and Windows versions).

At first this was great! I was getting lots of attention and praise from the people at Central Point Software and the people from IBM seemed to be pleased. What I was not aware of was the fact that IBM hadn't officially agreed to pay Central Point Software for the use of their utilities - they were, at that point in time still deciding and evaluating.

During this 'evaluation' time people I didn't even know from my company were calling me checking to see how things were going and to ask if there was anything I needed. "I need some help." I explained. No problem, they sent out two of the best programmers from my company to help smooth things along.

Well, IBM finally signed the magic piece of paper stating that they would indeed give Central Point Software a nice chunk of change for the use of their software. This was great, the marketing guy who had been running around going crazy trying to get everybody to sign flew out to Florida and took myself and the people sent to give me a hand to one of the greatest and certainly most expensive dinner in my life - we were celebrating. I wasn't sure why, buy the food and wine were flowing and I didn't really care.

I have to tell you that I know pretty much nothing about wines, except if I like it or not when I taste it. The only wine I had ever bought up to this point in my life was the occasional white box wine. So, here I am having this expensive dinner with the marketing guru and he asks me if I like the glass of wine I am drinking, I tell him that it tastes pretty good. He then informs me that it costs $15. "What the bottle?" I ignorantly ask. "No," he chuckles, "a glass!". I look at him, I look at my glass of wine, down it and say "Fill'er up please."

It was right after this that the powers that be decided it was time for me to learn a very important, although painful lesson about corporate life. As soon as that paper was signed, the friendly calls asking if I needed anything ceased, they came no more. They were instead replaced with calls demanding to know when I was going to be finished with the project (which included translating 300 Megs of code and crap to 13 languages!).

To make a long story short, I tried my best, I really did. I worked my ass off for 5 months working on that project. In that 5 months, I worked every day, every day but one. One Saturday while back in Portland, I locked myself out of my office when I went to lunch, so I didn't go to work the following day. I had forgotten how nice it was NOT to sit in front of the computer for hours at a time - it was very relaxing.

I was quickly becoming burnt out and getting a bad attitude. When I get a bad attitude, I tend to become a little naughty, so I started going to work at IBM (where almost everybody wears a suit and a tie) in shorts and a tee shirt.

The shock of me walking around in shorts soon wore off, so it soon became time for a more drastic measure. I was asked to come in and work over the Memorial Day Weekend at IBM. Which I did, but wasn't happy about it. To drive that point home, I came into work wearing my "Microsoft MS-DOS" tee shirt. You see, when I was working on the MS-DOS utilities for Microsoft, they gave me lots of nice goodies, including some Microsoft MS-DOS tee shirts. Since Microsoft and IBM are/were direct competitors for DOS (which is what I was working on) this turned a few heads.

They finally sent me an assistant to help me with the project. Nice guy, but completely unqualified - knew nothing about Windows programming or anything I was working on. I was too busy at the time to stop and hold his hand and teach him what I was doing, so I told him to go have fun in the Florida sunshine, which is exactly what he did - he went skydiving for the next 3 days - lucky bastard.

In early June I reached the end of my rope. I finally decided that the money I was making just wasn't worth the hassle, stress and lack of appreciation (sounds like a Dilbert storyline, I know, I'm sorry). Anyhow, I resigned. Just like that, one moment I was talking to my new boss on the phone and the next moment I said "I resign." and hung up the phone. I walked around and said good-bye to all the now stunned people I had gotten to know at IBM and then got on a plane.

Looking back, it was probably not the brightest thing to do at the time. I had no other jobs lined up, not even any real possibilities. I was unemployed.

Thus we come to the conclusion of my adventures at big blue.

After finally seeing the light (Central Point Software was going down the tubes) I, as many before me jumped ship, I quit. However, unlike those that leaped before me, I had no other job lined up - upon reflection, that may not have been the wisest of choices at the time. No matter though, for as usual, luck was smiling upon me, or playing a cruel joke, I still haven't decided.

Remember my boss from CPS? Well, it turns out that he has a name, something besides boss, his name is Tim Towell. I always suspected he had a name, however, I had assumed it was some kind of Indian name like "One whose head has much empty space". Anyhow, Tim, having had much greater foresight than myself, had taken a job at Intel several months earlier. I was talking to Tim one day, telling my tale of woe, for I had been called by 'head-hunters' wanting to know if I wanted to move to the Chicago area for a job. I am particularly fond of Oregon and had no desire to move half way across the country for a job, however my savings was quickly so I was beginning to consider the head-hunters offer. At this point Tim says to me "Would you like to come work for me for a while?"

That is how I came to work at Intel. Tim made arrangements for me to become a contractor and work at Intel. This was to be a temporary position until we found some suitable permanent position for me.

The temporary position lasted for a year and a half, until I came to Japan. During that time I was working with an exceptional group of people on the Intel Pro-Share Conferencing product.

Well, my first amusing (hopefully) stories from Intel has less to do with Intel itself than with my boss Tim, yeah, he's back again. I have two stories concerning Tim, myself and Mt. Saint Helens. Tim works very hard, he likewise plays very hard. He is a pilot and a snowmobile enthusiast.

One day Tim comes up to me and says that he's going flying after work and wanted to know if I would like to come along for the ride. It was a beautiful day, so I said I would love to go. It was a small plane, supposedly for 4 people, but Tim is way over 6 feet tall and I am not what you would exactly classify as a tiny person, so the plane was full.

We decided to fly around Mt. Saint Helens (you know, the one that exploded in Washington State on May 18th, 1980). It is only about a 20 or 30 minute flight from Portland. On the way, Tim, asks me if I would like to fly for a while. Having played various flight simulation games, I felt I was up to the minor challenge of this little plane, so I told him I would love to fly.

Well, after a while I became confident enough to actually move my hands, rather than hold completely rigid and started enjoying myself. Wasn't too difficult, flying in a straight line in good weather. Started playing with the rudder controls, making the back of the plane kind of wag like a dog's tail.

Tim gets this grin on his face, reached down and does something to the trim. All of a sudden, I had to start applying some reverse-force to the yoke in order to keep the nose of the aircraft level. Guess Tim decided I was having just a little too much fun playing with the rudder and decided to make me a little nervous, for he once again played with the trim controls, I had to really pull on the yoke to keep the nose up. All the while Tim is just sitting there grinning at me.

After that he took the controls again, which was fine with me. A few minutes later he asks me if I can see some land feature or another below us. I tell him that I can't, for the nose of the aircraft was blocking my view. "No problem!" he says, and proceeds to clear my view by putting the aircraft into a nose-dive!

We finally make it to the mountain and I am taking a real good look at all the downed trees still remaining and taking pictures when the little plane, with very flimsy wings dropped about 200 feet in one big jolt. Master Tim (he likes to be called this) chooses this time to warn me that there might be some slight turbulence ahead. After removing by tonsils from my sphincter, I thanked him for the information.

The second story concerning Tim and Mt. Saint Helens involves another of Master Tim's passions, snowmobiles. He decided to take me and another Intel employee (also named Tim) to Mt. Saint Helens to go snowmobiling. A first time for me and the other Tim.

We get there, unload the snowmobiles and await instructions on how to operate the machines O'Death as I now like to refer to them. Well, Master Tim kind of has a philosophy of learn by doing. He told us, turn this to go, pull this to stop and twist these from side to side to turn - bye! And he was gone.

"Can't be too tough." I thought to myself. Off I went. The first thing I did was almost kill half a dozen cross-country skiers, who as we all know already have a great respect and love for snowmobiles plowing though the peaceful snowscape. I apologized profusely and then I was off again. Going straight was pretty easy, after a while I got the hang of easy turn.

I was doing pretty well, as long as I stayed within the trails. Being one to never use much common sense in these situations, I decided to do a little trail blazing of my own - right into a big ditch! Snow was everywhere, as was I and the snowmobile!

Tim turned his machine around and came back for me. "Lesson number one," he said, "how to get a snowmobile unstuck." He's like that, let's you screw up and then he helps you figure out what you did wrong and how to fix it. It is one of his better qualities, that I find very useful, and sometimes extremely annoying!

After pulling the snowmobile out of the snow bank we proceeded up the mountain. I had no idea where we were going, I was only concentrating on staying out of any more ditches. As it turns out, I should have concentrated a little harder.

to be continued...

Amusing Life as a contractor at Intel stories coming soon...