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logging camp. I stopped reading for about a year, and I learned the basics of plumbing, wir-
ing, chain-sawing and car repair. For cash I worked as a gardener, waiter, sawmill laborer,
andplanter-boxmaker.Inthesevariousworkplaces, Iwastypically theonlyemployee with
a strong background in French and Russian literatures.
Then, by the late 70s as the universe of the counter-culture began to contract ever more
rapidly, I moved south and took a job as a teaching assistant at the College of Marin in
Kentfield, California. After about a year, my former roommate from the Kibbutz in Israel
came to visit me and convinced me to go into business with him. We wound up opening
a bookstore café across the street from the college. Running the business was challenging,
and our partnership began unraveling under the strain. Picking peaches and washing dishes
together on the Kibbutz, we had gotten along admirably. Here in the world of business my
partner metamorphosed into an unrecognizable life-form. One Sunday, our day off every
week, I stopped by to pick up a book and discovered that the oven and all of the stovetop
burners had been left on, full-throttle and unlit. That ended that collaborative adventure,
and I struck out on my own, eventually finding a job in the financial district of San Fran-
cisco selling computerized accounting services.
Woody Allen has a joke about never wanting to belong to any club that would accept him
as a member. Since I knew nothing about computers, sales or accounting, I should have
been more suspicious about working for any outfit willing to hire me. In its best moments
the company was run on a shoestring, and I was paid in dribs and drabs and then not at
all. I got out of there about six months before the CEO was indicted for selling franchises
illegally and the company went belly-up. It was a rough start, but it did enable me to get
my foot in the door of the burgeoning world of personal computers.
As you might imagine, writing resumes for myself has never been an easy task. With my
latest CV prominently featuring my in-depth experience in computers, sales and account-
ing, I managed to get a real job with a regular paycheck in a thriving hardware/software
store in San Francisco. Neil, the storeowner, turned out to be another Jewish kid from New
Jersey; he had majored in art history at Rutgers and had also come out to California in the
early Seventies. I'm sure he realized that I knew almost nothing about computers, but he
assumed, given my academic background, that I would be smart enough to learn. The new
job ushered in an era of blessed stability, and I worked there diligently for a number of
years.
I began to read InfoWorld, Byte, PC World and PC Week religiously, absorbing and learn-
ing to talk tech-talk almost like a new language. Over time I slowly turned into the com-
puter maven that I was pretending to be. I even became the go-to salesman for business
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