Friday, October 20, 2006

The randomizer dropped me on Friday, October 20, 2006, and at first there didn’t appear to be much there. No Blogger post. My Blogger archive doesn’t even start until a month later. No obvious LiveJournal artifact turned up. Gmail had a few things—a Mars Hill newsletter, some family email, administrative stuff for a men’s group—but nothing that screamed THIS IS THE STORY OF OCTOBER 20, 2006.

Then we started looking at the days around it.

And apparently we landed on the last day of a world.

In October 2006 I worked in the technology department at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Except I didn’t actually workthere, because Mars Hill wasn’t paying me. I had a title—Desktop Support. I had a Mars Hill email address. I had support tickets. I had my own workspace. I was there most of the business day, usually rolling in sometime around 10 because, hell, I was volunteering anyway, and staying until 5. I even had a computer. Sort of. I commandeered an old laptop that was being retired and made it mine.

My desk was upstairs at the Ballard campus, behind and above the sanctuary. Walk up the stairs and there were some gray cubicles. Nothing fancy. Laptops and computer parts scattered around desks. Sam Barrett was there. Preston McGee. Seth Faxon. A few other people came and went that I can’t reconstruct anymore. It wasn’t some gleaming technology startup. It was a church IT department full of half-dead computers and people trying to keep an increasingly complicated organization running.

And I fucking loved it.

A year earlier I had been an electrician.

That career lasted just long enough for me to destroy my back. One week after I turned twenty-five, I was doing side work, digging a shallow trench for grounding wire, when something popped in my lower back. An MRI eventually showed a herniated disc at L5/S1. My doctor told me that a career involving heavy lifting and bending probably wasn’t a great idea anymore. I should get a desk job.

That story already has its own post. What matters here is what happened after.

For a while we were financially okay-ish because I had unemployment and long-term disability. But I had no idea what my life was supposed to look like anymore. I had expected to be an electrician. Suddenly that future was gone. I went back to community college and took some computer classes because computers were one of the things I already knew I was good at. This was also the era when I misunderstood an assignment asking for a ten-slide PowerPoint and instead made a ten-minute PowerPoint about the captains of the Enterprise, so clearly higher education was going extremely well.

Eventually I realized I was learning more by actually doing IT than I was sitting in class.

So I started volunteering at Mars Hill.

By October, it wasn’t really “volunteering” in the way we usually use that word. It was work. Heidi called it work. My friends called it work. I called it work. On October 4, Dwayne Forehand messaged me, “are you at work??” and I answered, “yup.” On October 12, while arranging to bring food to Dwayne and his daughters while Joy was away, I told him I’d drop it off “after I get off work.” On October 18, Heidi Myers asked where I was and I simply answered, “i’m at work.”

Mars Hill just hadn’t gotten around to the part where work results in money.

A week before this random date, my friend Nick Moceri asked how the job hunt was going and whether the church was going to work out.

“it’s just a matter of time,” I told him.

Then I explained the situation more accurately:

“yeah, i’m at the church for good pretty much, just when they start paying me is up in the air”

That is an astonishingly complete description of my career on October 20, 2006. I already thought I belonged there. And honestly, I did.

A few days after this date, my friend Julie Hubert was asking me to create an email address for the staff Christmas party. She told me I was invited.

“It is staff only,” she said.

“But you are invited.”

“because its like youre staff”

Then:

“I didn’t even know you weren’t!”

I probably thought that was hilarious. Julie was a great friend. Her husband Zack would later become my boss, and I’ve always had the impression that the two of them helped push my eventual hiring along. The documentary trail definitely shows other people advocating for me later, but Julie’s surprise captures something important about this particular moment: nobody around me really experienced me as “the volunteer.”

Including me.

This was one of the happiest work environments I had ever known.

That’s important to say plainly, because twenty years later it would be very easy to retell this as a story about exploitation at Mars Hill. The unpaid labor was real. The financial strain was real. We were using an EBT card for groceries. I was probably still living partly on long-term disability. A few days earlier I had told Nick I had income “for a while,” which is not exactly a sentence produced by financial security. And I would remain unpaid for another nine months.

But that is not how the room felt.

Mars Hill was my world.

There usually wasn’t a line between friend and coworker. We ate together. Our spouses were friends. Our children played together. We had people over to our house. We brought meals when someone’s spouse was gone or somebody was sick. We played games. We went out for drinks. We prayed for each other. We fixed each other’s computers. Conversations about servers and passwords would turn into conversations about somebody’s wife, somebody’s kid, dinner plans, a party that weekend, or whether there was a microwave at another campus so I could heat up my food before a meeting.

Later this culture even developed a name around the technology team: Dinnetech. Julie would cook these enormous meals for the technology staff and our families. Years later my archive preserved little Evelyn refusing to nap because she was chanting, “I go Dinnetech.”

That was the world beginning to form around me.

I had wanted to work in ministry for years. For a while I assumed I would end up doing youth ministry. My parents had always done youth ministry alongside their regular jobs, and I loved the idea of it. I also figured I would be perfect with teenagers because I was so fucking strange.

Instead, apparently my ministry was Exchange Server.

Which, honestly, was perfect.

I loved troubleshooting. I loved figuring out weird computer problems. I loved learning systems. I loved helping people. And because I was doing all of that at Mars Hill, the work felt connected to something bigger. I wasn’t merely rebuilding a career after wrecking my back. I felt like I had finally found a way to do something I was good at while serving a church I loved.

And I was having fun.

On October 18, Doug Finefrock needed a new theology email address. I created it and sent him the appropriately reverent announcement:

“all the theology are belong to you”

If you lived on the internet in 2006, you understand this as theology filtered through “All your base are belong to us.”

That was pretty much the vibe.

Meanwhile, home life was moving just as quickly. Evelyn was about eighteen months old. Heidi was very pregnant with Theo, who would be born November 25. There had already been midnight trips to the hospital. On October 13 I told Nick, “Dotty’s ready to come out,” using Theo’s old name, “but once we get there it’s very exciting even though it’s too early.” On October 19 I told Mark Kaetzel that Heidi had been sick, I had been sick, and that we had been talking with her doctor about Braxton-Hicks contractions. The doctor wanted her resting a lot.

Five days after this random date, Heidi would message me from home saying the contractions were coming about every twenty minutes and that she was worried because the baby wasn’t moving much.

And I was sitting at my desk doing tech support.

This entire year had been compressed into something ridiculous. A back injury had ended a career. I had gone back to school. I had abandoned school for practical IT experience. We had a toddler and another baby almost here. My sister was living with us, which I cheerfully described to Nick as having “a built in babysitter.” We had recently moved into a rental house, and I told him, “it’s so nice to have a house instead of a room.” Money was tight. Our future was uncertain. I was working full-time for a church that wasn’t paying me yet.

A few days before this, my old friend Elton Kelly emailed me from Chicago.

“Last time I heard from you you were having kind of a shit-year.”

That seems fair.

But the strange thing is that by October, I had also found where I wanted to be.

And our random date appears to have landed on the final day I got to be there in that particular form.

On Thursday, October 19, Doug wrote an email about a volunteer computer station in Ballard that was about to lose its home because “the entire back half of the upstairs area” was being torn down. Doug said:

“As of Monday I’ll be in Wedgwood…”

That night I messaged Andrew Pack to ask whether there was a microwave at Wedgwood because I had a meeting “there.”

There.

Not here.

Then Monday arrived.

October 23.

Julie messaged me from Wedgwood asking for the network key. She told me where she was sitting and I replied, “i’ll be up in a sec.”

Two days later, I opened a conversation with her by saying, “I noticed you weren’t next door.”

By October 26, I was troubleshooting another computer and complaining that the Office installers were on the server “in ballard or in a book over there” and that we would need to copy files “over here.”

Ballard had become over there.

On November 1, I told Preston, “when we switched to wedgwood…”

So I can’t prove that Friday, October 20, 2006 was literally the exact moment I packed up my commandeered laptop and left that gray cubicle for the final time.

But I think it was.

And if it was, then the randomizer gave me something I never would have thought to look for: the closing scene of my first real life in technology.

Twenty-five-year-old me sitting upstairs behind the Ballard sanctuary. Gray cubicle walls. Old laptop. Computer parts all over the desks. Sam and Preston and Seth somewhere nearby. Heidi home pregnant. Evelyn still tiny. No paycheck. No idea that it would take until July 25, 2007 before I could finally announce:

“I got a job now, punks.”

No idea what Mars Hill would eventually become in my story.

No reason yet to hear ominous music.

I was just happy.

I had found work I loved.

I had found ministry.

I had found my people.

I had found home.

Monday we would move to Wedgwood.

Hit the lights, Mary.