Who I Was

I was, and am, a writer. Regardless of my job title, or lack thereof, I have always written.

With the exception of my first jobs as a paperboy and a library assistant, every one of my positions has required some level of writing. Articles for my college newspaper. User manuals. Zines (in my previous brief foray into business, Gresham Press.) Requests for proposals. Responses to requests for proposal. Marketing requirements documents. And other documents.

And when I wasn’t getting paid to write, I was writing for free. A college dorm newspaper, the Eastport Enquirer. Nearly a dozen personal blogs since 2003, a few of which are still running. Professional blogs. 

I guess I was, and am, a “you can pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands” type.

By June 2020 I had amassed 25 years at IDEMIA and its corporate predecessors. I marked the anniversary on LinkedIn:

“The exact date (which I still need to find) occurred some time in the month of June, 1995, when I officially became an employee of Printrak. (I was a contractor from October 1994 to June 1995.)

“So I’ve spent a quarter century working for Printrak and its successor companies – Motorola (pre Solutions), MorphoTrak, and IDEMIA (and some interim temporary company names here and there).

“During that quarter century, I’ve moved from working with 500 ppi fingerprints stored and accessed via Digital UNIX computers in police stations, to working with a variety of biometrics and document types stored and accessed via everything from smartphones to government cloud facilities, accessed by users as varied as police officers and people attending sporting events – well, when we actually have sporting events that people can attend…

“It’s been a valuable quarter century.”

That reference “actually have sporting events” was a reminder that in June 2020 I was still temporarily (since March) working from my house in Ontario rather than IDEMIA’s office in Anaheim. COVID was still a worldwide pandemic, and the only sporting event I had seen was 20+ year old video of the Chicago Bulls winning Michael Jordan’s “last dance.”

By July 2020…my story had changed.

Put me in, coach!

But I still was, and am, a writer.