It's all about jobs, isn't it?
I mean, the recession is affecting everyone. Rosanne and Dan, the Bundys, the Simpsons. Noticing the placement and size of a cover line on the September 7 issue of New York magazine, a Magazine Week writer said that it looked like the magazine's name was "Getting Fired New York." Not a bad idea, the writer thought: a line of regional magazines for the unemployed. Black humor.
Still, some people's job woes are a little special.
Take Gene Wang, who recently left Borland after four years to become Symantec's vice president of development tools and productivity applications. Now Borland is claiming that Wang sent proprietary Borland information to Symantec CEO Gordon Eubanks via MCI Mail. Kinda casts a pall over the new job, especially with the police raiding your house and all.
Or take Hillary Clinton, bright, talented, ambitious, and one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the country, according to The National Law Journal. If her husband gets elected President, she'll find herself in an unpaid job that Martha Washington called "more like a state prisoner than anything else." Maybe her husband will appoint her Attorney General.
One job woe that is becoming all too common is that of the mainframe information-systems specialist who gets laid off and can't parlay 20 years of experience into a job. ComputerWorld ran a series on the problem in August. One laid-off $95,000-a-year veteran, after spending 18 months looking for work, had to settle for a $20,000 job.
Hillary's husband has a lot of faith in retraining, but retraining will at best put a worker on a par with recent graduates (college, graduate school, business school, or trade school). Not many $95,000-a-year jobs at that level, unless you're a lawyer.
Interestingly, all the evidence I can gather tells me that you don't care beans about this. Like the rest of the news media, I won't let that stop me from beating the subject to death, but if I'm right that you aren't worried about your job security, why aren't you?
Maybe you think that you could launch a software company and be supporting yourself in a few months if you had to. You know this lawyer or this person who once wrote a business plan, so all you need is one brilliant idea. Well, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong.
I had a brilliant idea once. It came from a science fiction story by Fritz Lieber about a cat that would only drink from the toilet and kept tipping over its water dish and batting at the water as it ran across the uneven kitchen floor. I think it was drawn from Lieber's life.
It turned out that the batted water was an ephemeral artform. The cat couldn't tip over the toilet, so it drank that water. This is a story fraught with meaning, but what I picked up on was the idea of ephemeral art. Sand castles on the beach. Performances where recording equipment is prohibited. Now, computer art is nonephemeral by nature. My notion was to subvert that, creating a document that would destroy itself after one reading.
Imagine my chagrin when I learned that science fiction writer William Gibson has done it.
Gibson and artist Dennis Ashbaugh have created something called "Agrippa," a multimedia thing that disappears after you look at it. It costs a lot of money and is published by Kevin Begos, Jr., New York. Penn Jillette wrote about it in the September PC Computing.
Moral: Don't let those brilliant ideas sit around. Or: Publish, copyright, and sue.
Lotus won its suit with Borland (what goes around keeps going around) over the 1-2-3 interface, and has taken out self-congratulatory ads saying that "Borland's copying is no different from someone plagiarizing The Grapes of Wrath, changing the ending, and calling it a new novel. It's really that simple."
Excuse me, but I've read John Steinbeck, and Lotus: You're no John Steinbeck.
Copyright © 1992, Dr. Dobb's Journal