Once, a long time ago, I looked up, found out where I was, and wondered, “How did I get here?” The road of life often takes us in directions that we don’t plan and can’t foresee. If we look back at the map we followed during a lifetime, it is often surprising to see which route we finally took and how different it was from what we imagined in our youth.

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Out of high school, I got engaged and joined the Navy. They were unrelated activities, but that is just the way it worked out. When I got out of the service, I told my fiancé that I wasn't good enough for her and that the wedding was off. She said, “No way, buster! I can fix you.”

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She spent the next five decades attempting to fix me. I started college in Journalism, intent on becoming a writer. I graduated with a degree in Biology, intent on becoming a forest ranger. I actually got my first job doing research in potato breeding at a research center in Idaho. While there, the project purchased a programmable calculator, and I taught myself to program. It was actually an early mini-computer, but they didn’t know what to call them back then. From there, my ambitions and life direction stood on the brakes and slid sideways, landing me in a computer analyst job for a food company. The food company produced primarily French fries.

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Along the way, my wife and I built our own home from the ground up, had three kids and, moved to Washington State. But that is my personal story, and this is about my working life.

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Eventually, I worked my way up to the position of Process Control Manager at the corporate office of the aforementioned food company. The position was part of the Engineering department. It entailed the development of computer control and automation for plant facilities (this is the point in my story where people’s eyes glaze over and they start looking for a reason to excuse themselves).

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Our group worked on existing, renovated, or new facilities, whichever took precedence. The following is the story of a new plant the company built in the South to process sweet potatoes into sweet potato fries, which had just hit the market and was becoming quite successful. It was a new plant, destined to be state-of-the-art, so I saw it as a demonstration of actually controlling a processing plant with computers.

Unfortunately, that ambition was thwarted by a long-held, unstated tradition that went something like, “Computers are for accounting - supervisors belong on the plant floor where they can see, feel, and smell the process and NOT sitting in a control room!” I attempted to gather evidence to the contrary, since it was long known that the most consistent quality product was made on the graveyard shift.

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By monitoring process changes, I had hard evidence that the fewest changes occurred during the graveyard shift. Graveyard shift was also where the best quality of product and also when the highest volumes were typically produced.

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My assumption, therefore, was that better quality and quantity were produced when the supervisors were in their office, sleeping or throwing wads of paper at each other, as opposed to when they were out meandering around the equipment and making changes.

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Therefore, I assumed that if there were a control room where supervisors could see all aspects of the process in one place, better decisions could be made. It would open the door to having the computer monitor and make minor changes to some settings, thus freeing up the supervisors to make better decisions.

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This turned out to be an uphill battle since it was not supported by managers, who felt that if the supervisors were in their office, they would be sleeping or throwing wads of paper at each other. Undaunted, I proceeded to take aim at the new plant in the South for the automation showplace.

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Thus began the adventure, exhaustion, anger, and finally, the culmination of my career.