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on aliens and brass rats May 3, 2002 |
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Today's Reading This Year's Reading Today's Starting
Pitcher |
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When I was 16 my parents packed us all into a Plymouth station wagon for the ritual cross country family camping trip. Boston to San Francisco with 6 kids in a station wagon. Imagine it, if you dare. Somewhere in the huge, flat expanse of Missouri the Plymouth engine bent a rocker arm or a camshaft or something like that. It was a long time ago so I don't remember exactly what it was but is was bad. The car wasn't going anywhere under its own power any time soon. There we sat. Six kids and two adults in a broken down station wagon on a hot dusty road miles from anywhere or nowhere. Eventually a pickup truck went by kicking up dust. Sometime after it passed us, the driver realized he'd just passed a broken down station wagon full of kids. He backed up at 60 miles an hour kicking up another dust cloud on the way back. We ended up riding in the back of his pickup truck to a rural general store that had a phone (this was well before cell phones) so he could call a tow truck to take the car to the nearest Plymouth dealer, which turned out to mostly sell combines and harvesters and such. Anyway, while we were hanging out at this store waiting for the tow truck my Dad struck up a conversation with the guy. You know, all that where are you from where are you going stuff. Then the guy asks my Dad where he works. MIT says Dad proudly. "What do they make at MIT? I work at Fruehoff where they make them big trailers." I have absolutely no memory of what my Dad said they made at MIT. My brothers were impressed that the guy built Fruehoff trailers. After all, we'd seen those all over the place on the road. Eventually the tow truck showed up and we got a ride to the combine dealer where we camped for three days while they waited for a part to come from Kansas City or St. Louis or Chicago or someplace. It was only a year or so later that I realized this was my first encounter with a being from a universe of which MIT was not the center. Unlike Jessie's encounter with the aliens in Cambridge, this one took place on the aliens' turf. I should have learned a great lesson that day. Alas, I wasn't ready for it and it has taken me many many years to finally get it. And there was junior and senior year. And the form was void and the void was form. And the college application process began and ended. And the unthinkable happened. Yea, though it had been prophesied since kindergarten that I would go to MIT and become an engineer, the envelope was thin. I made the waiting list. Now in those days, in that time and place, there was a quota for girls and in order for a girl on the waiting list to get a spot in the freshman class, a girl had to decline. Since any girl who got accepted would be insane to decline, I knew the prophets had been wrong. And there was evening and morning on the day that defined the rest of my life. And so I went to Regis, an altogether better place for me as it turned out, and there was evening and morning and form and void and all that. Years later after many exciting adventures in software engineering and related disciplines including some minor amount of recognition by my peers, I was sitting in a meeting at a Cambridge-based startup that actively boasted that most of its engineers had gone to MIT. There I was surrounded by brass rats on the fingers of 20-something children who had yet to have written a line of production code. I turned to a colleague who also lacked the ring of power, the one ring to rule them all, and exclaimed "Gee, XYZ, we've been remarkably successful considering we don't have brass rats!" That cracked up XYZ but it went over the heads of the rest of 'em. Only then did I remember that long ago dusty road in Missouri in the universe of which MIT is not the center. |
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Copyright © 2002, Janet I. Egan |
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