How Technology Changed My Life: The Story Behind Cheap Houses
From Cardboard in My Shoes to a Career in Technology: The Story Behind Cheap Houses
I grew up in rural northern Alabama in cheap houses with cracked walls, little insulation, and sometimes no indoor plumbing.
I picked cotton, hauled pulpwood, baled hay, cut fence posts, and did whatever work was available. I wore hand-me-down clothes and sometimes put cardboard inside worn-out shoes because buying another pair wasn't always an option.
At the time, I didn't spend much time thinking about whether we were poor.
That was simply life.
Years later, I would become a United States Air Force medic, work in medical information systems, receive an Air Force award for my work in technology, and eventually build a career with companies such as EDS and HP.
I would finish that career working at a level I could not possibly have imagined as that kid in Alabama.
The distance between those two lives is part of the story I tell in my memoir, Cheap Houses: A Memoir of Poverty and Reinvention in Rural America.
A Few Cards About Something Called a Computer
One of the small things that helped change the direction of my life came long before I ever touched a computer.
They were called Future Cards.
The cards described technologies that people believed might become important someday.
One of those technologies was something I had never actually seen: a computer.
Today, that's almost difficult to imagine. We carry computers in our pockets. We use them to communicate, shop, work, bank, navigate, watch television, take photographs, and look up almost anything we want to know.
But when I was a boy growing up in rural Alabama, computers might as well have been science fiction.
Something about them fascinated me.
Those cards showed me that there was a world beyond the one I could see around me.
I didn't know how I would ever become part of that world. I didn't have a plan, and I certainly didn't have the money.
But the idea stayed with me.
Looking back, those little cards planted a seed.
At Seventeen, Another Door Opened
At seventeen, I joined the United States Air Force and became a medic.
That decision changed my life.
The Air Force introduced me to places, people, technology, and opportunities far beyond anything I had known growing up.
I worked in different areas of medicine and later served in aeromedical evacuation, helping move patients aboard military aircraft.
Somewhere along the way, my old fascination with computers returned.
Medicine and technology eventually came together for me through medical information systems.
I didn't have a four-year computer science degree.
I didn't grow up around computers. Personal Computers didn't even exist at that time.
Nobody in my family had prepared me for a career in information technology.
I learned by doing.
One problem at a time. One system at a time. One opportunity at a time.
From Air Force Medic to Information Technology
By 1992, that kid who had once read about computers on Future Cards had traveled a very long way.
That year, I was recognized as the United States Air Force Medical Information Systems Non-Commissioned Officer of the Year.
I can still appreciate the irony.
The boy who once put cardboard inside his shoes was now being recognized by the Air Force for his work with computers.
My technology career didn't stop when my military career ended.
After leaving the Air Force, I continued working in information technology. My career eventually took me to EDS and later HP, where I worked in increasingly senior technical positions and eventually as an Enterprise Cloud Services Architect.
Computers went from something I had read about on a card as a child to the foundation of my professional career.
That's one reason technology has never been just machines, networks, servers, and software to me.
Technology represented opportunity.
Why This Story Belongs on ExtraHelp.us
If you normally visit ExtraHelp.us because you're trying to figure out Windows, find a lost file, connect a printer, understand your Wi-Fi, avoid an online scam, or learn another computer skill, you might wonder what any of this has to do with you.
Quite a lot, actually.
People sometimes look at someone who understands computers and assume that person has always understood them.
That's rarely true.
Every person who knows how to use a computer once had to learn how to turn one on.
Every person who understands Windows once had to figure out where things were located.
Every experienced computer user has clicked the wrong button.
We've deleted things we didn't mean to delete. We've forgotten passwords. We've installed the wrong thing. We've broken things.
And then we've figured out how to fix them.
I certainly have.
That's one reason I created ExtraHelp.us.
I wanted a place where ordinary people could learn technology without having everything explained to them in a language only another computer technician would understand.
You don't need to become a computer expert.
You just need to be willing to learn the next thing.
That's how I learned.
But Cheap Houses Is About Much More Than Computers
Technology is only one part of the story.
Cheap Houses begins long before computers entered my life.
It is about growing up poor in rural America.
It's about moving from one cheap house to another.
It's about family, fear, hard work, mistakes, survival, opportunity, military service, persistence, and reinvention.
And it's about what happens when the kid you once were is never quite as far behind you as you thought.
There are stories about hauling pulpwood, picking cotton, baling hay, working in the woods, and growing up in places where luxuries were things other people had.
There are stories about joining the Air Force at seventeen and suddenly seeing a world much larger than rural Alabama.
There are stories from my years as a medic and from aeromedical evacuation missions.
There are stories about medical information systems, technology, EDS, HP, and the career that followed.
But I didn't write Cheap Houses to tell people that everything works out if you just work hard enough.
Life isn't that simple.
Hard work matters. Opportunity matters. Timing matters. And sometimes luck matters a lot.
None of those things guarantees where someone will end up.
But sometimes something seemingly insignificant can alter the direction of a person's life.
A teacher.
A book.
A conversation.
A job.
A person who believes in you.
Or maybe even a few cards describing a strange new technology called a computer.
The difficult part is that you may not recognize the importance of that moment when it happens.
I certainly didn't.
Leaving Poverty Isn't Always the Same as Leaving It Behind
For many years, I measured success by how far I had traveled from where I started.
I had escaped the cheap houses.
I had built a career.
I had earned a good living.
I had accomplished things that would have seemed impossible when I was a child.
But there is another part of poverty that is harder to explain.
You can leave the house.
You can leave the town.
You can build a career.
You can earn money.
You can create an entirely different life.
And still discover that some part of the place you came from traveled with you.
That's one of the deeper themes behind Cheap Houses.
Leaving poverty behind isn't necessarily the same as leaving it within.
Maybe That's Why I Wrote the Book
I didn't write Cheap Houses because I believe my life provides a formula anyone else can follow.
It doesn't.
I wrote it because there may be someone sitting somewhere today who can only see the world immediately around them.
Maybe they're young.
Maybe they're seventy.
Maybe they're struggling financially.
Maybe they're afraid of technology.
Maybe they're thinking about changing careers.
Maybe they're wondering whether it's too late to learn something new.
Sometimes the next step doesn't look important when you take it.
Neither did those Future Cards.
But one small step can lead to another.
And another.
Until one day you look backward and realize just how far you've traveled.
That's the story behind Cheap Houses.
And, in many ways, it's also the story behind ExtraHelp.us.
Cheap Houses: A Memoir of Poverty and Reinvention in Rural America
If you've ever wondered how much distance a person can travel without ever completely leaving where he came from, that's the story I tried to tell in Cheap Houses. Read sample 13 chapters for free before you buy.
