A Million Little Pieces Of My Mind

On an earlier visit to Florida, I'd visited my friend, John Griffith, at his home in Fort Myers, Florida. Unlike me, he'd continued in college, gotten a degree, and became an insurance adjuster. But, like me, he'd been looking at the new "personal" computers with an eye to using them for business applications. So he asked for some advice on what to get to create a bulk mailing program that Deb, his wife, could use for a job of her own.

I recommended an AT&T with a (gasp!) 10MB hard drive built-in! 10mb wouldn't hold a single movie, now; but the instruction pamphlet said, "You'll probably never use up all 10 megabytes. But, should you want to delete a file you've created…" and then gave directions for the DOS DEL command. I also suggested dBase II for her database program, and set up a few sample tables with names and addresses for her to fill in.

Well, about a year later, Deb's business had taken over the garage, and John had quit insurance adjusting to join it, and they were about to move the kit and caboodle to a larger space. That meant they would need employees, including a data processing person because that wasn't actually in Deb's skill set. (Her specialty was in terrifying customers who were reluctant to pay, into paying.)

So, on our Christmas visit to St. Augustine, John met Mary and me for lunch, where he offered me, not only a job, but a part in the company if I'd be their IT (Information Technology) guy.

My contract with Arlington Hospital would be over in March. Now, I liked contracting: the freedom, and the wider range of experience it brought me. Plus, as a consultant, I had to pay for my own health insurance. So, in comparing salaries, I had to include the fact that, should I take a salaried position with John's company, it would include that important benefit.

Plus, I had confidence in John's ability to pull this off. His actual degree was in Engineering, so he definitely knew how to put pieces together and make them work.

So. I agreed. We began the task of packing (which, admittedly, Mary did most of since I still had to go to work). When I drove our station wagon and U-Haul down to Florida, it was to a condo John had already found and rented for us, in a development at the south end of Fort Myers, called Bluefish Court.

There were lots of kids in the neighborhood, which was one of the reasons John had selected it. So my four made friends with the neighbor kids, and it being before the era of helicopter parenting, they all spent their free time in the Florida jungle. I learned later that the older kids had taught my 11-year-old son John (yes, named after my friend) how to catch a water moccasin. Yes, I was horrified; but since he didn't get bit and die, I had to admit that it's better to know how to catch one safely than to not know!

The office building no longer exists but it was something like the A.I. photo below.

The office address was on McGregor Blvd. It was in a long strip of offices/small warehouses that extended perpendicular to the main road. GBS (Griffith Business Services) was at the far end of the strip. So you couldn't see the road from the front of the office. There was no "storefront". It faced the parking lot that had lots of lush, un-manicured greenery across from the building that almost formed a wall. There was a dumpster nestled in the greenery. (They had issues with homeless folks sleeping near the dumpster on occasion.) There was no glass front. Just a beige building with solid doors and a garage door at the end. They had a painted wooden sign with curved edges. It was like two feet wide by 1.5 feet tall.

Beverly Griffith, 2025

So I found myself tucked inside a noisy bulk?mail shop in Fort Myers, doing a kind of work most people didn't have a name for yet. While everyone else focused on trays of envelopes and the thrum of the addressing machines, I sat at an AT&T 6300 coaxing dBase II and Turbo Pascal into turning chaotic mailing lists given to us in various forms—including handwritten pages of paper!—into something usable. Customers would hand over disks or even dot?matrix printouts that were a mess of formats, typos, duplicates, and oddball conventions. My job was to make sense of all of it. I wrote little Pascal routines to automate the grunt work, built dBase scripts to merge and clean records, and slowly shaped those unruly lists into clean, sortable data the shop could rely on.

Most days felt like a mix of puzzle?solving and quiet satisfaction. I'd watch a jumble of names and addresses snap into order because of a script I'd written the night before. Every improvement shaved hours off the shop's workflow, even if no one outside the back office ever noticed. Looking back, it was one of the first times I realized how much I enjoyed building Services—taking something messy, understanding its logic, and turning it into a tool that made everyone's day run a little smoother.

The end result, for me, was the sheets of printed labels that would then be cut into individual addresses and then affixed to the mailing pieces the customer had also supplied, by machines John had bought, cobbled together, or outright made. Then they'd be sorted into trays by ZIP code. By afternoon we'd be ready for the United States Post Office to make their pickup.

But, remember, all computer work back then was abysmally slow, especially compared to now. I mean both the writing of programs and routines, and the running of them. And often, it wouldn't be until after a half-hour run that I would discover some bug that meant fixing an output error and re-running the whole darn thing. So, night after night, I would find myself working until midnight or later, yet still needing to be back at work at 9.

So I got sick. I had all kinds of crazy symptoms, and my doc insisted on putting me into the hospital for tests. The only conclusion they came to was that I was suffering from medically-significant exhaustion. (My first day in the hospital, I slept for 16 hours. And they let me!)

We all agreed I needed to work more reasonable hours. But no one knew how that could be done without impacting the amount of work we were contracted to put out. So not much changed as a result.

There was a time that John decided to hire some inexpensive data entry people to copy printed or hand-written address into my system. (This was before scanners and handwriting-to-text or OCR was available to us.) This was a good idea. However, after about four hours' work, when John went into the data entry room we had put together, he discovered the "typist" had entered exactly 5 addresses. In four hours.

13-year-old Dorothy could type faster than that!

John was on his way to having four kids of his own. His oldest, Beverly, was just a little younger than my Dorothy. So all the kids spent a lot of time at the business, sometimes helping, sometimes just playing with labels and small pieces of equipment in unused rooms.

But John also knew how to make the most of his leisure time. He owned a boat, and often our two families went out onto Fort Myers' New River, and even the Gulf of Mexico beyond.

Then I have to spend a moment talking about the Griffiths' dog, Bantu. Bantu was a Rhodesian Ridgeback, and one of the smartest dogs I've met. Once I went out to the pool with him, and he proceeded to teach me how to play an elaborate game involving the pool, a ball, a Frisbee, and a ballcap. He was smart enough to know the children were never allowed in the pool area (which was just outside the sliding glass doors from the dining room) without an adult. So, one day when John and the kids were home alone, and John was occupied in the toilet, one of the little ones managed to open the door to the pool and to step out. Bantu literally knocked the bathroom door down when his barking didn't get John's attention fast enough.

Bantu passed away eventually, as we all do. John and Deb were devout atheists. But when Deb had their littlest baby, David, they couldn't help but note he seemed to have many little quirks that reminded them of Bantu, a dog the baby had never known. For example, weird sleeping positions and an unreasonable insistence on chewing pizza crusts. As a global belief, reincarnation doesn't usually expect souls to change species. (That belief is called "transmigration".) Still, Bantu was as much a person as I've ever known—he wasn't even my dog, and died at least three decades ago, but I still miss him. So it's nice to imagine that he reincarnated as David Griffith. And I know no one in his family would think that was anything but a compliment.

One time while visiting the Griffiths at their home in North Fort Myers, we were having lunch, when I noticed the decorative palms growing in front of their home, were being whipped about by the wind. John and I stepped out onto the porch and watched as the entire sky rotated around us, and a for-real tornado dipped down! I was frantically worrying about where we should put the kids for safety, while John kept humming the Wicked Witch's theme from The Wizard of Oz and complaining that he couldn't run inside to get out his video camera because he didn't want to miss anything!

The twister touched down about two blocks away. We could see chaise lounges and pool tables flying through the air. I knew we should be ducking-and-covering or something but I couldn't tear my eyes away.

Later, we tried to drive through the neighborhood to offer assistance (and gawk) but there was a guy guarding his cul-de-sac with an automatic weapon so we waved good luck and returned home.

As months went by, though, nothing was said about shifting me from being a salaried employee, to being a co-owner. And the lower salary compared to NASD, even with the insurance, was starting to smart. So I said something to John, who got a sheepish look. "I know I said that, but you know…there's no way Deb is going to give up a sliver of it. I didn't realize, a year ago, how closely she was going to clutch it."

And then I got a call from a guy I'd done a 3-month contract for at Arlington Hospital. He wanted to hire me, full-time, to help with the creation and installation of a hospital medical records system, back in Arlington, Virginia. It would pay more, include insurance, and we would be back in Virginia, where, frankly, we liked it better than Florida.

So I gave John my notice, and we moved out of Fort Myers exactly eleven months after we arrived.