If, then

I like to watch educational programs, like NOVA or knockoffs of various levels of quality. One series, called The Future is Wild, considered what would happen in the future of evolution if we were to continue on the current path. One episode had a sequence where octopuses swing from trees. I laughed at the time, and I laugh now, but you can’t say they didn’t make a memorable illustration of a wild outcome.

I love to consider the chaos of consequences. To map out what letters follow action A is a joyous, freeform exercise of imagination that is only exceeded in ridiculousness by reality. Who could have predicted that candle ratings would reveal the spread of a viral respiratory pandemic? You’d have to consider the market, the characteristics of people who supply ratings, and the features of the pathogen, specifically that it affects sensory cognition. I couldn’t have drafted this. It’s good stuff. The writers should be proud.

Every eventual positive outcome in my adult life originates from my mother insisting her work, a nursing home in Flatbush, buy a computer and a printer.

On days when she worked late and no childcare was available, my brother and I would sit in the records room and print off birthday signs or pictures or whatever we could make from ASCII text. This was how I learned to type, trying to make a teddy bear from letter Xs.

When my mom found a portable computer for sale at a price she could afford, she bought it so we could Embrace the Future. Of course, it was old and limited and really not at all the future. Still, on that machine I learned how to type more than the letter x.

Years later, when my elementary school upgraded their computers, I offered to help do setup. I certainly couldn’t have written software on them, but I knew how to plug them in and insert CDs and follow software installation prompts. I still remember how excited the computer lab teacher was, and the rows and rows of shiny multicolored iMacs with sharp serial ports and the chemical smell of unpackaged power cables.

By then, we had a real computer at home (beige), where I followed meteorology and sailor moon forums and talked to friends on ICQ and did what I can only describe as raids on AOL chatrooms with friends from school.

This is all to say, by the time I started full-time work at the age of 17, where my college years were supposed to go, I was an expert in how a non-expert (me) used computers. The bosses, the most concentrated group of older white men in an organization predominately not-old or white or men, approached me as the local youngest person who typed fast.

Without any exaggeration, that job and my work brought me out of poverty. In the economic downturn, transitioning away from physical files was a money saving venture, so I stayed employed in dry years. I worked for banks, surgical centers, and construction offices, scanning, sorting, and indexing papers. I earned good money and learned about peoples lives from the bits of paper companies stored about them.

Electronic document management led pretty smoothly to a comfort with other types of database and categorization systems, like... content moderation.

What if those dudes had not asked me if I knew about computers? What if my mother, who really should’ve become a programmer herself, hadn’t left me in that records room in Brooklyn to play on the computer?

I can’t imagine what other work I could’ve done that would’ve sustained me. College was unimaginatively expensive. I wouldn’t have had the financial freedom to make choices that led to meeting my husband. And, as I had never wanted children before him, I wouldn’t have become a mother. It isn’t octopuses swinging from trees, but the future of that timeline is almost unrecognizable to me now.

The choices of others and the chance of a few moments took me down a narrow path of success and happiness. And now, with the severe improbability in mind, this is how I begin all of my stories. If, ... then.