My Niece, Part 2

There are moments when I wonder why I am bothering to document all of this. As soon as I think I have finished with my memories, I remember something else like the day my niece’s boyfriend was hiding in my house. There just seem to be so many stories. It seems like there was trouble with ‘T’ all of her life. The earliest story I have been told about was the day that 4-year old ‘T’ tried to run over a neighbor child with her battery powered motorcycle. When the child’s father told my niece to go home, she told him to “hit the bricks”. The expression came from my dad. My brother-in-law took ‘T’ to the offended neighbor and made her apologize. I heard that she cried, but not because of shame for behaving badly, but because she had her motorcycle taken away.

When she started school, the kindergarten teacher had so much trouble with her that the school refused to allow her to return unless she was medicated. Her behavior in third grade was so bad that the teacher moved ‘T’s desk to the front of the room. I mean right in front of the blackboard, not just the front row. I saw it myself, so I know it is true. School continued to be a problem with her. In middle school she showed up one day high on marijuana. The school system transferred her to a special school with behavioral problems. My sister always seemed to believe the fault was the school, not her daughter. I always felt sorry for my brother-in-law. He seemed to be trying to be a responsible parent, but my sister would always back up ‘T’ and ignore his input. When she was 13, ‘T’ was hospitalized in the psychiatric ward. I don’t know what precipitated it, but it was around the time that she was diagnosed as bipolar. She got a furlough to come home for Christmas. My son and I were spending that Christmas with my sister’s family. I was napping on Christmas Eve when I was awakened by my niece crying hysterically. What had happened was that ‘T’ was playing with my son who was 5 at the time, he fell, she fell on him and he had a large cut on the back of his head. It is not fun to be in the ER on Christmas Eve. By the next morning, ‘T’ had reworked the story so that my son was at fault for getting injured and her bad judgment had nothing to do with it.

As I said in Part 1, my niece had been given 7 years probation for the forgery conviction. She managed 3 years of reasonable behavior. Things began to really degrade when she moved in with the abusive boyfriend. Then when she left him and moved back in with her mother and me, and brought the friend who was also on probation. Her behavior was bad enough while she was with us, but it went downhill after I told her to leave my house. She stopped reporting to her probation officer and was involved with drug dealers.

She called one day in late February 2005 saying she had taken a job and needed to come by the house to get some clothes for work. My sister had paid for clothing for ‘T’s many different jobs, so there was a selection stored in the basement. ‘T’ showed up with a woman I did not know and carrying a puppy. She opened the refrigerator for this woman and told her to help herself since, as ‘T’ said, “This is my (‘T’s) house, my real house”. I bristled at this statement, but decided to address it later when the woman was gone. After pouring soft drinks, ‘T’ went to her mother’s bedroom and dropped the puppy on the bed. My sister exploded! She was allergic to flea bites and we didn’t know anything about this puppy. ‘Z’ yelled at ‘T’ to remove the pup from the bed. ‘T’ started shouting back and everything fell apart. My sister was extremely ill by then and did not need to be upset .I told ‘T’ to leave immediately. I was so angry by then that in front of ‘T’s companion I reminded ‘T’ that this was not her home and she had no right to offer the hospitality of my home to anyone. It ended up being one of those yelling matches where everyone’s trying to out-shout the other. She finally left when I picked up the phone to call the sheriff.

Later that day, ‘T’ called on my phone line. She apologized at first and then got angry with me because, according to her, I had embarrassed her in front of her friend. I wanted to hang up but she insisted she had to apologize to her mother. I reluctantly gave the phone to ‘Z’. From the end I was able to hear, they were arguing at first, but then I heard my sister give ‘T’ permission to return. When the call was over, ‘Z’ told me she had allowed ‘T’ to come back to get her clothes. Since she had been ordered out earlier, she had not looked for her clothes. She showed up alone some time after dark. I remember her spending some time in the basement and then she said she wanted some private time with her mother. After about 20 minutes, I found her in the ‘office’ in the dark talking on the phone. I told her she was supposed to be with her mother, not in the office. She did go to her mother’s room after that and then left shortly thereafter.

The next day, I answered a call on my sister’s phone line. She was really feeling awful that day and asked me to take care of the call. It was her bank. They had called to get approval to cash a check for ‘T’. I asked ‘Z’ if she had given ‘T’ a check. No. 'T' must have stolen the check the night before. My sister kept her blank checks in a desk drawer. I asked how much the check was written for. The teller said it was for $1,550.00. I told the teller to call the police immediately, the check was a forgery. They tried to delay ‘T’, but she figured out that something was wrong and left. The police chased her in her car. The story she told me later was that she ended up in a cul-de-sac, grabbed her puppy and ran through to woods to elude the police. She supposedly lost the puppy while she was running. The police lost her.

I called her probation officer to report the incident. I found out she had been assigned to a new probation officer and he was in the process of obtaining a warrant for her arrest for probation violation. Even though I put the probation officer in touch with the detective handling the new forgery, she was never prosecuted for it. Also probation violation is not considered a high priority by the police unless the person has a history of violence, so she went free for a while.

In April my sister was back in the hospital. By then ‘T’ had contacted her probation officer to try to talk him out of punishing her. They made arrangements for her to surrender to him on a specific date. It was decided that my sister needed to be transferred to a nursing home for rehabilitation since she had not been able to walk since January. ‘T’ did help me with the transfer. We had to take ‘Z’s personal stuff to the nursing home. 'T' told me she was supposed to surrender on Thursday of that week. She was also telling her mother that the surrender was delayed because she was helping the police with a drug sting. My sister asked me to stay out of it, but by Wednesday, I called the probation officer to find out what was going on. I told him about the drug sting story and he said it was a total fabrication. The sheriff’s office could not use her in a sting without his permission. Plus she would have had to have been arrested already and there was not record of it. He also said she was supposed to have surrendered herself on Tuesday, so she was late in meeting with him. When I faced her with the truth (in her mother’s room at the nursing home), she told me to stay out of her business and left. She was finally arrested in early May and had a crack pipe in her possession at the time. Between the county jail and the state prison, she served 14 months. During that time, I had to have her sign papers to have my sister cremated because my sister was comatose by then and it had to be signed by the next of kin. The last time ‘T’ saw her mother was the day I called her out on her lies.

Cell phones saved my sanity during my sister’s illness. I felt I had to have the phone so that my sister’s doctor could reach me at any time. I never gave ‘T’ the number to my cell phone. I unplugged my sister’s phone at home, but left the answering machine attached. I turned off the ringer on my line; I had voice mail. I checked the machine and the voice mail at least once a day. Many times the messages were from ‘T’. She would scream obscenities and threaten me. Better that she did that to a machine than to me. The people who needed to reach me had the cell number. When my sister went into the nursing home, I got her a cell phone. The nursing home would allow installation of a hard-line or use of a cell phone. We never gave ‘T’ the number.

‘T’ was paroled October 31, 2006. She is living in transitional housing in Atlanta. She called me for her birth certificate since I am still storing some of her stuff and the personal things of her mother’s I am keeping for her. I paid $32 to order her a new one over the Internet. She needed it to get a job. She says she is working. She seems to think the family should welcome her back like she had been away at summer camp. I laid down my conditions in a letter I wrote to her during her incarceration. I want her to finish her obligations to the state of Georgia, get a job and support herself for five years and then we can talk. She has never truly supported herself or taken full responsibility for her actions. My sister would either give ‘T’ what she wanted or ‘T’ would take it. I am not my sister and I will not step into the role she played in her daughter’s life.

Me and the technology revolution

I was awakened yesterday morning by my cell phone crying out for recharging. I just took it off the charger the day before. I couldn’t get enough signal to call home and tell someone to remove my dog’s coat, so the phone wasn’t really used. I think I need a new battery. Since I was already awake, I got up to watch my favorite morning show Good Morning America. They had a segment on viral videos that got me thinking about technology.

I sort of fell into the technology arena as a career; it was actually a desire to avoid PE class that got me into what was call Data Processing in 1970. I had moved to a new town and they had vocational training available in high school. I had observed some of my brother’s experiments into weird science, so I thought maybe the Electricity/Electronics class would be for me. The Vo-Ed guidance counselor convinced me to go into Data Processing instead.

I didn’t realize that the school’s technology was just behind the times. It was all donated equipment, so they didn’t have a computer. I did at least learn to operate a keypunch (does anyone remember cards?), sorters, interpreters, collators, calculating punch machines, reproducers and tabulating machines. They were all geared to manipulating punched cards and hopefully create meaningful reports from them. It was sort of fun playing with all of those wires we had to plug into thick plastic boards. We were also given classes in accounting and I learned I had a knack for putting numbers in little boxes.

Still not really having a goal in mind, I applied to college with Data Processing as my major. It wasn’t until I started my classes that I discovered that it was computer programming. Luckily it fell in line with putting numbers in little boxes, so I did well. I was fortunate to get a programming job shortly after graduation and so began my career. I never thought that my high school training would be of any use, but I was the only person who even recognized the dusty old machines in the storage room and so became the on-site expert for punched card applications.

I think a lot of my success was due to the fact that I was always like a kid on Christmas when presented with new technology. I still marvel at the fact that the laptop I am using right now has more memory and computing power than some of the mainframe computers I worked on in the 70’s. I do confess that I was very skeptical about personal computers when they first appeared. I thought of them as glorified video games. My brother-in-law had introduced my then husband to Super Pong and my hubby had to have one right away. Of course I was the only opponent available to him, so I got hooked into playing almost every day. He seemed to enjoy trouncing me just a little too much, so I developed a real dislike of video games that required aiming and shooting. When Atari introduced its first home computer, my ex wanted one. I did not want a computer in my home because it was too much like bringing work home. I also figured it was just to give my husband a newer, bigger video game console. The day I found a personal accounting program for the Atari, I started to see the home computer in a new light. Unfortunately my husband got the Atari in the divorce, so it was a little while before I had a computer at home again.

I didn’t really expect the microprocessors to stick around. At one job we had created an Accounts Receivable system on a mini-computer to replace one that ran on a mainframe. We converted one branch to the new system and noticed some performance problems. It was taking almost as long to process one branch on the mini as it did to process the entire company on the mainframe. We still had 37 branches to convert to the new system. So we set up a test using 10 branches. The results were laughable. My project leader was really into statistical analysis and had a ball working up the projections. At 75% conversion, it would take 24 hours to process the accounts. At 100% the projected processing time was 48 hours. I had done some research into the operating system of the mini and found that our time problem was related to the alternate inquiry paths that the analyst who designed the new systems had used liberally. Every time one account was updated, all of the account records had to be updated to preserve the alternate paths. Surprisingly the answer was to create a separate file for each branch.

The IBM personal computers started appearing in my office in 1985, but they were used only by management. They seemed limited to word processing and spreadsheets. Having worked with batch processing applications for years, I still didn’t see why people were so thrilled with Lotus 1-2-3. I figured the admin folks were just glad to see the old Wang word processors go away and force all of us technical types to do our own documentation. I did like the flowcharting program. It was much more fun to use than a pencil and a plastic template.

The business analysts kept throwing around the term “automated platform”. I was working for a bank and it turned out that ‘platform’ referred to any function performed a branch by anyone but a teller. This was where they were going to first utilize the PC’s. I had been working on loan applications and the first to use the PC’s would be Customer Information. CIS had just been an application we fed with loan information. I didn’t realize how important it was in the bank’s relationship with the customer until the big re-vamp of CIS started. The automated platform was going to be a byproduct of the CIS project. It just seemed to take forever to get off the ground.

The first real value I saw of the PC’s use in business applications was when my team started reworking of our loan calculator. We were fortunate to have a business analyst who was a math whiz. He had also learned Lotus, so he had set up Lotus applications that the programmers could use to test the new mainframe version of the loan calculator. By the time I retired from the bank the automated platform was a reality. We had tied networks of PC’s in the branches to the mainframe. Account setup was performed in the branch by the personal bankers. The customer’s existing relationship to the bank was available to the network from the CIS system on the mainframe. Personal and address information was retrieved and could be updated while the customer was present. The PC specialists had worked out a method to distribute software updates to the networks over the T1 lines rather than having someone go out to each branch. We were creating loan documents on blank paper at the PC using stored boilerplates and data retrieved from the mainframes.

In 1988 my sister’s husband got an Apple II GS as part of a bonus from his employer. I ended up buying one for myself because my sister kept calling me with questions that I had no way to answer. I had never touched an Apple computer. I still didn’t want the computer to become a way to work at home so I was glad it was an Apple. I didn’t think it could communicate with an IBM operating system. I bought a 300 baud modem (wow!). Soon I was connected to GEnie (America Online didn't support Apple then) and discovered a bunch of games and applications for the Apple. There were bulletin boards where other Apple users that knew more than me were available to help me out. In fact that was where I learned I was wrong about being able to communicate with an IBM mainframe. Soon I had the appropriate software, was set up on the bank’s security system and now I could manage most of my middle of the night trouble calls from home. The only problem with it was having to logoff the computer to call the mainframe operators at the office. I do not miss dial-up. When several of us had computers at home and were handling trouble calls with them, I convinced my manager to get us a cell phone. It weighed about 5 pounds and had to be carried with a shoulder strap. I also had purchased a PC clone personal computer. It had a 100 MHz processor and 100 mg hard drive. Now I was in the fast lane! That was about 1990.

The personal technology boom started just about then. Cell phones got smaller, personal computers got faster and larger memory, and hard drives got larger capacities. I have upgraded or replaced my computer about 6 times. Megabytes gave way to gigabytes, which will give way to terabytes soon. Communications speeds took off like a rocket. I was a member of a very small group when I bought that 300 baud modem. Now I find it difficult to get through a day without using the Internet and on a cable modem of course. I have become one of Time Magazine’s Persons of the Year! I use VoIP telephone, so no more long distance charges. Cell phones not only allow us to speak to each other, now we text message; take pictures and video then send them to our friends; listen to music downloaded from the Internet and can check our email. Soldiers in Iraq are able to record events and post them on the Internet. We are truly able to communicate around the globe and it is all due to personal computers, cell phones and the Internet.

My grandmother lived through the advent of airplanes all the way up to the space shuttle. My mother never learned to use an ATM. She felt the people of a certain age just could not learn to live with all of this new technology. I vigorously disagree. I feel like I have experienced 200 times the technological advances she was exposed to. I still have a time to experience more. Where will tomorrow take us?