| Weltuntergangsstimmung -
A
feeling that the world is falling into chaos. This was uttered by a German soldier at the battle of Stolingrad. |
Dominic Vautier
3/2012
Off I went to
St.
Edwards, the local diocesan seminary and spent a year there but they kicked me out
because I slept during math class. It is difficult to see how math
can become a total bore but the teacher managed to do it. This guy could have made a
very good hypnotist rather than trying to teach math. St. Edwards
was a great experience as you can see I describe life there in
more detail at Life at
Edwards.
However my mother was undaunted about this minor setback at St. Eds and sent me to the Salesians down in California, a wonderful order founded by John Bosco who lived in Italy during the "resurgimento". Don Bosco took care of a lot of the orphaned boys caused by all the wars and later he opened several schools, or Oratorios. He was a good and remarkable man.
I spent 3 years in a minor seminary at Richmond, CA and then went to Novitiate which was a place where you were supposed to devote a year getting extremely holy. Then I went on to the Salesian College in Newton, NJ, studying to be something I didn’t think I wanted to be, but my mom wanted me to be. Finally I decided that it was not my career and left. My mom was by that time too old and sick to object but I think that I had paid my 8 years..
Of all the challenging jobs that could be done in 1964 I decided to join the army--not a particularly smart move then because there was a war on in Southeast Asia and I didn’t like the idea of wading around rice paddies with people shooting at me. Instead I got lucky and went to Germany where they had lots of beer and girls. Army life in Germany was like painting a wall and watching it dry. Most of the time I sat around polishing screwdrivers and the rest of the time getting drunk. I described much of this in My Army Days.
My first exposure to the wonderful world of data processing was in 1964 when
I witnessed a real live computer demonstration with all the flashing
lights and moving thingies. I don’t know what it was about
computers but I liked all the blinking lights
and the IBM cards flying through mysterious machines where each card landed in a different
pigeon hole. I liked it. We were then shown
an old beat up IBM 1401. The pompous programmer gave a pitch announcing
that he had worked for an entire six months on a new program that did God knows what
to God knows who. I was not impressed with him but the computer was pure magic. This
was my kind of job, whatever it was, and I could certainly do it better and
faster than this other guy could. I then and there decided
that it was what I wanted to do when my real life started up again after service,
which was by the way, definitely not a career.
My job in the army had absolutely no bearing on computers or anything else in the world. It was surveying, that is, trying to find out where things are on the earth, especially enemy targets. Surveying in civilian life is seasonal employment, and did have a lot of outdoor exposure. My first choice was living in my part of the country, the great northwest, which is incompatible with working outside unless you are a duck. It rains all the time in the great northwest. In fact it rains so much and if I were to be a surveyor, I would be getting wet all the time which happened a lot in the Army. I contracted a serious sinus allergy while in service that didn’t let me to be outside very much, and so I was forced to look for an exciting and thrilling desk job, which may have been hard to find for a natural extravert like me.
At my mothers insistence of course, I went back to college at the University of Portland but I was definitely not a good student and the teachers were very bad because they were old and they were Jesuits. My only interest then was in girls, drinking, and watching Star Trek, which everybody my age did anyway. I also signed up for every glee club and chorus at college because there were lots of girls and I had a good set of pipes. Then my money saved from the army ran out, so I decided I better get a career. In order to get a career job I had to learn something, so I went to a Business College.