Long Lost Machines

In my chosen profession, more often than not, a customer's location is remembered as "the place where they have that beastly printer." Or as the office with ink stains on the floor. Or of the one time a filing cabinet was placed atop a network cable, ultimately severing the connection from the weight of said filing cabinet. Or...

You get the idea.

Since I have begun a transition into a world I know nothing about, that promise of identifying a customer by their machines has gone right down the crapper. Every convenience store has the same equipment. Every bank has the same equipment. Every pharmacy has the same equipment. Every chain supermarket...

Again, you get the idea.

Early on - say twenty years ago - to keep my sanity, I began identifying places where I'd go to fix machines not by the machines, but by the people.

What a novel idea.

This morning, I started thinking about how long it had been since I saw a certain Laserjet III, and of a Laserjet 5si. And an old abandoned IBM PS/2 Model 80.

OK, that's not quite right.

I wasn't thinking about the machines, I was thinking about the people.

I received an email that a long lost machine person had added me as a friend on Facebook. That machine person hadn't entered my psyche for over a year. Partly since I hadn't had a reason to see the machine person, as I no longer have that machine person as part of my workday; I simply don't do that sort of thing any more.

Sure, there are people at the places I go to, be they banks, or convenience stores, or pharmacies, or supermarkets. But it's not the same. They're too impersonal. I long again for the personal nature of the industry I fell in love with over thirty years ago.

I hope you get the idea.