Back in the Jurassic ages when I was walking my dinosaur to school, I did an on-campus interview with Bell Laboratories. Passing that, I was invited to interview in Colorado and New Jersey. My wife was only willing to move to Colorado but Bell Labs insisted that I interview at three places. My luggage with my interviewing suit, of course, was misplaced on the flight to Colorado. I asked the person who came to pick me up if dressing up was necessary -- they said no and I put the tie (I had an extra in my hand luggage) back in the hotel room.
Four months later, time to find someplace to live in Colorado near Western Electric/Bell Labs. Came down out of the flight and went to pick up the rental car. "Where's your credit card?" What? Very few people in my area of Kansas had a credit card and I certainly didn't have one. "We won't rent to you without a credit card." We didn't have one so we asked what they would suggest. They referred us to a "rent-a-junk" agency who, with a very large deposit (about twice the weekly rental), were willing to rent a car. On to the hotel, not quite the same story but close. We put down a deposit for four nights rent (we had brought a lot of cash because I tend to be a mite overcautious) and they let us stay. The equivalent thing could happen ten years ago with cell phones.
On that same trip we saw billboards all around. "Buy a house in this development, prices starting in the low hundreds." Wow, what a bargain. My mother had purchased a house in our rural town only six years before for $3000. Now, I assumed that the houses weren't actually $100 but the thought that they were talking about hundreds of thousands was incredible.
One of my sons discussed graphics boards with me the other day. The movers had (among other damage) broken the graphics card connected to the mother board of his brother's computer (who was working -- but not yet in his field of graduation (BS, Computer Science, anyone need a hard-working person without post-college CS experience?) -- and decided he needed a functioning computer to continue job applications and, thus, now had a new computer and donated the old one to his brothers). He needed a functioning graphics board so he started talking about Nvidia GPU cards and called them "380", "470", and so forth. Looking them up on Amazon, I couldn't find any such boards -- it turned out that (as, he stated, his friends also did) he had the habit of dropping the second zero because it was always a constant ("0"). So, "380" was said instead of "3080" and "470" instead of "4070".
We founded our company, TeleSoft International, as a distributed company back in 1991. As such, we were all doing "remote" work long before the term was brought out and recognized over the past few years. That didn't mean (and doesn't mean currently) that there weren't occasions when it wasn't preferred to be face-to-face. One time, I needed to head (from Boulder, Colorado) to Washington, DC. I received directions from one of our employees and headed off.
I was greeted with a heavy snowstorm. On the good side, there was less traffic (and I am pretty experienced driving on snowy/icy roads). However, I also had a major problem. Their directions referred to something called the "Beltway". Now, those of you who live in cities that have their own beltways know quite well that it is a description rather than a name. There were no beltways in Colorado and, to the best of my knowledge, still aren't.
So, there I was, driving through the snow, trying to find something called the Beltway. It wasn't on signs, it wasn't on maps (this is before smartphones or ubiquitous GPS units). So, it was time to ask for directions. The person at the gas center laughed at me but told me that, for Washington, it meant I-495 which went around Washington, DC. For our employee, the word "beltway" was something that "everyone" knew. Alas, I didn't fit into the "everyone" category.
Each of us believes that the way we live, and what we know, is the same for everyone. Those who try hard to keep expanding our experiences may fall into that trap less than others but no one can escape completely. I could keep expanding on surprises and hurdles which have occurred but I am sure you can think of many on your own. What type of assumption on the part of another person left you wondering what was going on? Or assumptions of your own?
