Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — December 11, 2011

It was about twenty years ago that I worked briefly with Idell. I
was still pretty new in my job, and was not at all happy in it. In
fact I was considering whether my decision to take the job would rank
among the top five worst mistakes of my life—I was pretty sure
it would make the top ten, at least. I had fled from a situation
where I was expected to do software development of a very demanding
nature and at the same time manage a group of half a dozen
programmers. I was in over my head in both capacities, and in
addition I hated the second one. So I had left the corporate
high-tech world and taken a job at a small liberal arts college,
where the work was a huge comedown in the level of technical skill
involved: a mixture of programming and general support for the users
of the administrative database system.

It proved much more
challenging than I expected, not because the technology was so
advanced but because it was so crude and backward: the mid-1970s
hardware (a PDP 11-45, if that means anything to you, with a
20-megabyte disk drive the size of a washing machine) was falling
apart, the software was a badly designed mess implemented with the
crudest tools—even then, PCs were far more capable—and
there was no documentation. There were supposed to be two
programmers, but my predecessor had recently been fired, and the
other had resigned, with only her last two weeks overlapping with my
arrival. Worse, the most important part of the job was something I
really hadn’t anticipated: the users expected me to know as
much about their jobs as they did, and of course I had no idea what
people in a registrar’s office or an admissions office, to say
nothing of a roomful of accountants, did, and moreover didn’t
really care and couldn’t make myself get interested, except to
the extent that I was facing unemployment if I failed.

I think it was sometime within the first year or so of my tenure
that Idell was hired as the admissions office manager: by “office
manager” I mean not the director, who was in charge of the
whole operation and was focused mainly on strategies for recruiting
students, but the person in charge of the internal workings of the
office, specifically the maintenance of the database. That was one of
the most important parts of the job, and she wasn’t very good
at it. She was a middle-aged woman and in 1991 it was pretty likely
that someone over fifty or so had little experience with computers or
sense of how to work with them. For those who remember the PCs of the
time: in 1991 PC applications were still DOS-based, with Windows 3.1
not arriving till early 1992; only the Macintosh had a
point-and-click graphical interface. And our administrative system
was 15 years or so behind even the PCs in clarity and ease of use.

It was pretty obvious to me that Idell wasn’t comfortable
with computers and didn’t really understand that part of her
job, and was trying simultaneously to hide that fact and remedy it.
Complicating the picture was the fact that she was black. As anyone
who has ever been in a situation like this knows, some degree of
awkwardness is almost inevitable, and friction and tension are not
unusual. There will be people who expect black employees to be less
competent and are not sorry to see them fail; there will be others
who want them to succeed, or are afraid of being accused of racism,
and ignore their deficiencies, which of course causes resentment on
the part of those who have to work around those deficiencies.

Part of Idell’s way of coping with this seemed to be to
adopt a certain truculence in her manner—at any rate, she had
it, whether it was deliberate or not. So I was a little put off in my
first dealings with her. And, being frustrated and angry about my own
situation, I was pretty impatient, especially with someone whose
shortcomings appeared likely to create more problems for me. So I
remember thinking that she and I were not going to get along.

But I was also sympathetic to the feeling she must have had of
having been thrown into deep water and of struggling to stay
afloat—after all, I shared it. And anyway it wasn’t her
fault that I was in the situation I was in. And anyway one ought to
be nice to people. So I tried to be nice to her. When I worked with
her I tried to stifle my impatience, making an effort to explain
things when I could, rather than just assuming that she already knew
them or would figure them out on her own. That was all: no great deed
of virtue on my part, just a small effort to be decent and not to be
the slave of my own worst impulses.

So Idell and I got along pretty well for what proved to be her
fairly short stay at the college. I think it was probably less than
six months. I don’t remember now whether she left on her own or
was fired. On her last day she came by to see me. She told me that
she had enjoyed working with me and would miss me, and that I was one
of the few people she at the college who had seemed to care about her
and been willing to help her when she needed it.

I was very much surprised by this, and didn’t know what to
say. I thanked her and wished her well. I kept thinking about the
disparity between the little effort I had made and what it apparently
had meant to her. Was that all it took to make someone’s life a
bit less difficult? Just trying not to be a jerk? I’ve tried to
keep that lesson in mind since then; I’ve certainly had plenty
of occasions to need the reminder.

Well, in spite of the rocky start, I have remained in that job.
One day some years after Idell left—more than five, not more
than ten, I think—I had something to do in an office that I
don’t ordinarily work with. The secretary there, Frances, had
been a friend of Idell’s and had stayed in contact with her.
Idell had moved away and was now living in Florida, Frances said, if
I remember correctly. She had told Frances to tell me hello. And
Frances went on to say that Idell had been diagnosed with cancer and
wasn’t doing too well. And she gave me Idell’s address in
case I wanted to send her a greeting and a good wish.

I really meant to do it, too, but as is often the case with me I
put it off, and then one day I saw Frances again, admitted that I
hadn’t gotten around to writing Idell although I still meant
to, and asked how she was doing. But now it was too late: Idell had
died some weeks before.

It still bothers me that I never wrote to her. It would have been,
again, only a little thing, but this time I failed to do it. I hoped
she had plenty of family and friends around, so that the gesture that
I didn’t make would have had less relative importance if I had
made it.

I don’t mean to give the impression that I brood over this.
I don’t think of it very often, but I happened to see Frances
one day last week, and that always reminds me of Idell, and recalls a
bit of the surprise I felt when she thanked me on that last day I saw
her. I hope she’s with God, and that maybe she’ll put in
a good word for me.