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clients looking for accounting software packages. During slow afternoons I read computer
books behind the counter and eventually taught myself to program in dBASE II, the hot
database programming language of the mid-eighties. Along with the sale of every com-
puter, I began to promote auxiliary services on the side (mine). By 1986 I was working
part-time in the store and developing dBASE applications for private clients under my own
flag:
Learning Curve Systems
. I even had my own portable Eagle computer, an IBM-com-
patible that weighed at least 30 pounds. As I visited clients on-site, I would joke that being
able to carry one of these portables was the key prerequisite for being a consultant.
As I got to know people in this new world, I discovered that there was no shortage of
kindred spirits who had somehow found their way here. They were the people who had
majored in fields like philosophy, American Studies, anthropology, sociology, history and
comparative literature. Upon graduation from college they had discovered that society had
no interest whatsoever in paying them for what they had learned in school. To all the “hu-
manities retreads” of the world, the computer industry held out a blazing torch of oppor-
tunity.
The years I spent in the computer world were good to me. It was fun being somebody again
after all the years spent being nobody. “Marsha, I have to get off the phone. The computer
consultant is here!” All the while, however, I never lost the sense of being a stranger in a
strange land. I never really bonded with the computer world although I respected and ad-
mired many of the people I met there. As the years went by, there grew the nagging con-
viction that all the frantic hustle and excitement was, for me at least, just a distraction from
a hollow core at the center of things.
***
In 1987 I left San Francisco and my job at the computer store and moved out to Petaluma, a
lovely small town in southern Sonoma County. It was a pleasure to be out of The City after
ten years, and I felt that I had sufficient computer skills and clientele at this point to make
it on my own. A chance encounter at a client's site with a consultant named David led to
an offer of a six-week contract doing software testing for a company called Symantec. Six
years later I was still there.
The part-time contract work at Symantec became my steady income, and the programming
projects were now icing on the cake. I was starting to have a savings account; I looked for
new furniture to replace my vintage collection from Good Will and Sally Ann; I bought my
first new car. And, after a round of therapy with a Jungian analyst, I started thinking about
going back to school—to study psychology this time around.
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