Music takes me back in time

This afternoon I heard a song that took me right back to the first summer I worked as a programmer -- "That's All" by Phil Collins. One of my co-workers kept a radio on top of his flipper-door cabinets, where we all could hear it, and he kept it tuned to an AM rock station that played the hits in heavy rotation. The songs from that summer are entwined with the memory of my early days as an IT professional. Whenever I hear one I know again the pinch-myself feeling of suddenly not being poor anymore; of going from literally no income to sitting in a cushy burnt-orange executive chair at a massive desk, in a work space paneled with golden oak and trimmed with brass.

My group's ages ranged from mid-twenties to mid-thirties; at thirty I was in the middle. We worked hard but played hard too: I remember one day when we took the afternoon off and went over to our boss' house, where we played whiffle ball in the backyard and drank pitchers of margaritas until the sun went down. We were young and working for a young company, so young that some of the systems were still in their early stages. Two or three times a week our mainframe computer used to go down hard, and when it did we'd be unable to work for several hours. One of my favorite memories from that time occured during such an outage. I was leaning back in my cushy chair, with shoes off and nylon-stockinged feet up on my golden oak desk, and the radio started playing Donna Summer's "She Works Hard For The Money". And I said to myself, Self, you have got it made.