Places in New Jersey had more cows than people. Farmland, fields, and streams criss-crossed the land where I walked. You could wake up to geese in the fall, iced-over gurgling streams in the winter, mud and bright flowers in the spring and locust in hot, humid summer afternoons.
This landscape filled my memories but years later it would mostly be housing developments, McDonald's, and crowded roads.
Within this place songs and art flowed freely and were a way of of being. But California called and I answered. Technology called, too, but I wasn't listening.
Okay, so Los Angeles had sunglasses and freeways, margueritas and pool parties. While adjusting to life in "the Valley," I spent my time teaching first- graders and keeping my life as simple as possible in the midst of wealth and dubious character strengths. When the principal of the school bought 24 Commodore 64's and said he was looking for a computer teacher, it was the first time I had to think about what a computer was.
Looking for an adventure, I confidently told him I would be glad to be the computer teacher. I took the Commodore 64 manuals home, bought a couple of how-to's (very lacking at the time) and began to plan my first day teaching kindergarten through sixth grade how to use computers. I remember that most of the books tried to teach you to use BASIC commands. "To get the computer to echo your name back, it asks you a question." These were the highlights of the early years of computers.
I decided the younger kids would be happy using Type Attack, a new game where you shot down letters rolling across the screen. Many a kindergarten kid learned the alphabet in hyper speed using this program. You could see how the next generation was going to eat this stuff up. The older kids attached to Zork, the first adventure text games (yes, before there were animated games!), building models to help them represent their Zork world. I learned to use a comment that I would use many times in my later corporate life: "Very interesting question, now where do you suggest we start looking for the answer?" I became more of a facilitator than teacher and just made sure they had resources around to spark their imaginations. But the roar of the technology collision was upon me.
The husband of a kindergarten teacher was a partner in a computer company under contract to Commodore to write educational software for elementary level school kids. He wanted to know if we could run the software in our class with the students and give them feedback on how it ran and how the kids liked it. That was the end of my elementary school teaching.
At what seemed like an incredibly higher salary than I made as a teacher, I joined this computer company which was destined to take some internal tools we had written for ourselves and market them as XTREE, the first best-selling PC file management program. I had the pleasure of actually living that Silicon Valley dream- small company writes one successful program and makes good, building a small empire around this flagship product. I've hand-packed and heated shrink-wrap around product, shipped orders, spoken at trade shows, and handled phone support. Now computers had a permanent hold on me.
Having tired of the margueritas and pool parties, I moved to San Francisco. For three years I worked as an executive recruiter, learning all the buzz words and technology projects going on in Northern California. I also learned a lot about resume writing, interviewing, and database management. To balance this encroaching part of my life with technology, I also spent two night a week learning ceramic techniques of handbuilding and sculpture. This was my "hands" phase, where many of my sculptural pieces included hands someplace in the piece.
The largest piece I made was a desktop brickwall with hands breaking through the top of the wall spelling the word Silence in sign language. That piece is still emotionally pleasing to me, years later. I also found my love of three dimensional sculpture during this period.
Technology continued to tug at me and I set up a BBS (Bulletin Board System) to post high-tech jobs. I was the first woman BBS SYSOP in California on the international RBBSnet. There was such a barrier to getting job postings on the BBS, that I had to use an alias of Kevin to hide the fact they were working online with a technical woman. RBBSnet was linked to FIDOnet and this was the time I first began to learn about the online world. Though USENET was a flashy service to add to your BBS through FIDOnet, one never really heard the term Internet used.
My experience with BBSs help me to offer installing and configuring BBSs for companies. Again, feeling too overly involved with technology, I began taking a class to learn stained glass techniques. The struggle of balance continues. But I found my love of colored glass during this period.
While installing a BBS at a company called 800-SOFTWARE, I accepted a full-time job with them in their technical support department. After a year, I was promoted to Manager of Technical Support on the corporate track. I learned to manage a group of people that eventually grew to be large enough to hire a manager underneath me. I learned to speak to large groups of people (my teaching days came in handy - to break complex technical ideas into simple concepts). I learned how to negotiate and comprise in a corporate environment. And I learned to deal with the stresses that come with our modern corporatations: an employee that exploded in violence, bombs threats, toxic spills, employee law suits, and, finally, acquisitions.
Our first acquisition of this family-oriented company was deceptively smooth. We were purchased by Digital Equipment Corporation and my department began helping Digital with their customer technical support. Other departments had good experiences, too. We were never afraid for our jobs and just looked forward to all the opportunities Digital had to offer, even though they were going through financial and organizational crises themselves.
My department grew and began to offer technical support as a fee-based service. This was a new idea at the time and eventually it spread throughout the software industry. We had more work than we could handle. We moved to a larger building with a lot less character and a lot more corporate-looking. Here we implemented "cubicle" offices for the first time. An odd side effect we noticed pretty quickly was fatiqued eyesight and headaches. Walls were now so close and vision range so short that people were developing headaches.
Then, after only two years, Digital decided to sell off some of its holdings and 800-SOFTWARE was one of the entities put up for sale.
After a long and very demoralizing acquisition process, Digital sold 800-SOFTWARE to our largest competitor, Corporate Software. With many speeches about our compatible environments and how 800-SOFTWARE was going to build up the west coast for Corporate Software, we had no reason to believe it was going to be any different than our first acquisition experience. We were dedicated and we would find opportunity and stay positive. The CEO of Corporate Software made a press release assuring the channel and customers that this was not a "slash and burn" acquisition, but in fact we started to smell smoke immediately. Just a few days after the official close of the deal, Corporate Software laid off three Vice Presidents who were the heart of the company, and me. My whole department would be laid off by Christmas. It sent everyone into shock. With speeches of no more layoffs, January saw another wave of departments laid off, March/April another set and finally this past September they announced the whole site would be shut down. The fire storm had come and gone and 800-SOFTWARE was no more.
Being in the first and most shocking group of people laid off, I received an extremely generous severance package. I was paid handsomely to stay an extra month and make sure all support was transitioned properly. During this time, my technology and art background finally made a collision- I designed and wrote a business plan to develop The CraftWEB Project as an Internet service, to help bring craft artisans together to communicate and to help the world see the fantastic work being done by these artisans. And yes, I would be inspired to return to my own art work.
I continue my attraction to sculpture, working in wood and stained glass 3D pieces. I never have a dry spell because there is so much inspiration from the other artisans on the Internet. I spent 4 months writing a book, "In Search of Arts and Crafts on the Internet," to help those thinking about or just joining the Internet. It lists over 200 arts and crafts sites on the Internet.
I think it all comes down to communication and expression in whatever form that takes. And now I have the best of both worlds: technology in the service of craft art expression and art enhancing and driving communication through technology.
©1995 Kathleen McMahon. CraftWEB, the site designed and managed by Kathleen McMahon, is where you'll find her.
