A Journal of Sorts

17 February 1999

What IS TCP/IP anyway?

I think I'm learning interviewing skills. Things like making sure all my shoulder pads are where they belong and not having several pair of glasses on my head at the same time. Today, I had an interview with a place called SageUS. I've put it on my hopeful list along with MBNA. The benefits at Sage aren't all that great, but it looks like really interesting work and it is only a 10 minute drive from here . . .

The salary I'm asking for is going to be a stretch for them, as it is with most of the technical support positions I'm applying for. Since I've decided I want a career in tech support, I've been getting a lot of questions about why I want to do "entry level" work with all of my other experience - the old overqualified story. I can't really lie about the amount of money I've been making because they verify that sort of thing.

I had to take a comprehensive test when applying at Sage. I was sure clipping along in it feeling quite proud of myself for knowing all the answers until I came to the one. What does TCP/IP stand for? Brain dead. I should know that; TCP/IP is one of my things. No matter how hard I reached into my fuzzy brain, I could NOT think of what TCP/IP stands for. I finally wrote, "I forgot. (then described it) It is a suite of protocols blah blah blah". I also wasn't completely sure about the Windows95 questions since I've managed to avoid using that particular Microsoft product.

Tonight, we had Graff goulash for dinner. Basically, you brown some onion (I cheated and put garlic in there, too), put in some hamburger and tomato sauce . . .then, stir that with macaroni (the traditional Graff goulash used elbow macaroni. I cheated again; I used shells).

Every Friday night when I was a kid, we would go to the grocery store. I guess it was payday. My mother never drove, so she had to wait for my dad to come home from work and then we would all pile in the old Cadillac (we always had old Cadillac's) and head to the grocery store. Every Friday night, we would have goulash for dinner. I was absolutely sick of it; when I left home, I SWORE I would never eat that stuff again. Now, here I am, 33 years later, feeding it to my family. They ate it; they weren't impressed, but they ate it.

Tom took the camera to work again today, darn it. I had a good shot at some birds in the yard. . cardinals and blackbirds and starlings. I also had some inspiration about taking a picture of my front yard flower barrel. But what really hurt was when I found the ladybugs on the crepe myrtle. They were still green, not quite round, but had all their spots and the back end of them was starting to turn into proper ladybug color. It would have made a great shot with the macro setting on the camera, but no . . .Tom had smuggled the camera, once again, to work. Personally, I think that ladybug photos might be as important as first communion veils.

Maybe we should time-share.

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