A Million Little Pieces Of My Mind

In preparation for my attending the University of West Florida at Pensacola (UWF) full time, I located and rented a mobile home not far from the campus. Since I didn't have the full spread of VA benefits, designed to send a person to four years of college after six years of service (because of my abbreviated Navy career), I had to take as many courses at once as possible. But I calculated I could almost make it, and decided I would worry about that last semester when I got to it.

We moved from Panama City to Pensacola on New Years' Day. It was on the cold side for a few weeks, but then Florida spring came.

House or trailer, it didn't make any difference to the kids. We even had the luxury of a pool ($10 at Walmart), leading to one of my favorite batches of kid pictures.

One night Mary asked me to run to the 7-Eleven for some milk for the kids. While there, I got to talking to the cashier. He told me he had gone to UWF for programming, but he had hated it. In those days, programming involved creating a deck of punch cards, submitting it to the computer operator, and then, when the results arrived, they usually consisted of error messages that told the programmer which mistakes had been made, with suggestions on how to fix them.

"I couldn't stand being told I was wrong all the time," my cashier friend admitted.

I didn't say anything, but I was thinking, how awful it was for someone who had the ability to work with computers, to now have to face a lifetime managing a convenience store.

"But, as it turns out," he continued, "I love managing this store. I love working with people much more than I liked working with equipment!"

That gave me some much-needed perspective.