TMI, But It's My Introduction

In 1960 I was graduated from college with a B.S. degree in Physics which I never used except on resumes. I was unable to get a job at first, but a friend got me a job working construction on the first job in the Washington D.C. area that poured all of the floors for a multi-story building on the ground and then jacked them up to where they were supposed to be. I did a lot of fetch and carry and a little tying rebar to support the concrete. When that job was finished I could not go to the next job because I am afraid of heights and I would have had to climb for that job. The boss did want me to go to the next job and said he was sorry I was leaving,

My next job was another construction job working for a company whose owner was a friend of my father-in-law. That was really tough, and I spent a lot of time looking for other positions.

Finally I became a federal employee to work at what was then the Bureau of Standards. I was calibrating elastic load-measuring devices. This was a big thing because some of them were used to determine when rockets at Cape Canaveral had a full load of fuel, and President Kennedy had already set us to send someone to the moon by the end of the decade -- very high priority.

Even though my federal job was impotant, it became boring, and I went to work for Philco, an electronics company that at that time was manufacturing a computer to compete with IBM's offering. They taught me to program in assembly language for the Philco 2000, and when they did not get a government contract that they expected to, many of us were let go.

I came back from Philadelphia to the D.C. area and began what was to be a forty-plus-year career doing programming and related jobs. I guess I was a hack, but I enjoyed what I was doing, and I was fairly good at it.

I started drawing Social Security when I was 62 and a half, and a few years later quit working altogether. By then my wife and I had bought what used to be her grandparent's farm with money we got from selling my mother's house after she died. We owe nothing on the real estate, but we also have very little, non-growing income.

That led me to try to make some money on the internet, but what I ended up doing was waste a lot of money buying a lot of shiny-object income schemes that didn't really work for me (or me for them.)

So here I am, hoping that my repressed urges to write will give you folk at steemit some interesting reading on a variety of subjects and earn me a little extra cash.