60 seconds before I left the building for the last time I sent the following goodbye message to my colleagues:
* * * * * After 36 years of working at the pleasure of Wisconsin taxpayers it's time for me to step down and start another chapter in my life. Working at DOT has been a great career experience. It lasted 17 years. I had the privilege to work with a top-notch team of workers in the IT field, the best I've ever encountered in my career. What I found most fulfilling is how we worked together through many challenges. Granted, on occasion some of those challenges caused us to occasionally disagree, as all of us are prone to do at times. But together, we always hammered out the illusion of our differences and found a way to work towards a common goal. Together, we got things done. Together, we will continue to get things done. Together is what matters. To everyone, so long, good Bye, and thank you for the wonderful DOT memories I was lucky enough to accumulate. I hope I will continue to bump into many of you in the near future. Steve Johnson * * * PS: For the still curious, I have written down a few more written words. What are my plans? I've have a hankering to start working on a number of personal projects that have been on the back burner for way too long. Some of you know me as an artist. For example, here's one of my works used on the 2014 WisDOT Affirmative Action Advisory Committee calendar: <IMAGE REMOVED> Abduction of Kinkade C 2014, Steven Vincent Johnson svjart.orionworks.com [email protected] I also compose music and write about topics that interest me. Sometimes my writing (I have been told) may occasionally annoy others, though my primary intentions have always been to inform and hopefully entertain. I also do computer modeling work which typically involves running lots of simulations. I suspect a couple of Honey-Do projects may find their way to the top of my in-basket as spring and summer roll around, too. That said, my first project will be to take a long unstructured vacation of undetermined duration. Ask me what I'm doing a couple of months from now, and we'll see what project I'm currently working on. Reminiscing just a tad here, in the late spring of 1978 just after graduating from college I was hired at Wisconsin Department of Revenue as an LTE. We knew it as Building "L". It was located across from University Avenue, directly north of the Hill farms complex. It was a cyclical business. Wisconsin tax forms would flood the building at the beginning of each new year. The flooding would last six months or longer. We hired a lot of seasonal LTEs to process the tax forms. My initial duties involved maintaining an edit check program that processed tax forms after they had been written to a twelve inch tape reel by teams of data entry personnel working on a CITRIX system. The edit check program I maintained was written in BAS (Basic ASsembler), a programming language one step above machine language. It ran on an IBM 360 mainframe, model 20. In its day the model 20 was extremely popular, somewhat of a precursor to what later become known as a minicomputer. Ours came installed with 32 kilobytes of magnetic-core memory, the maximum amount allowed for model 20 architecture. The memory architecture, which was quite bulky by today's standards, was similar to what was initially used during the Space Shuttle program. Memory access speed was comparable to an Apple II microcomputer. NASA liked using it because it was large and bulky making it Impervious to pesky cosmic rays. We made do. How things have changed. Thirty years from now when the current crop of just out of college DOT employees begin contemplating their own retirement plans, some may nostalgically think back to the fond decade of 2010-19. A few may recall that the term "Desktop" meant squinting at a small flat 19 inch glowing monitor screen that displayed turgid little icons. or if one was lucky maybe two monitors infested with turgid little icons. They will gaze across the slanted glassy surface area of their glowing desks and wonder how we had ever managed to put up with such primitive limitations. But then. reality sinks in. Whoever predicted my ever growing stack of eDocs would soon be automatically shuffled to the correct eBin should have their heads de-fragmentized. Suddenly, my VR glasses ping me. I click my teeth to retrieve an incoming vex-message. A 3-D apparition of my spouse forms three feet in front of me. Only I can see her image because it's being stereoscopically laser scanned directly onto the back of my retina. She wants me to add two boxes of Celestial Seasonings Asian Spice Tea to the grocery list. the red box, please, not the orange box. She holds up an image of the red box. My teeth click back an acknowledgment, "done. c u 2nite." Good thing she showed me the red box sporting a lion wearing wrap-around UV protected dark glasses sipping on a cup of tea. She knows I can be occasionally dyslexic when it comes to reading the titles of tea boxes, and cans of cat fud. Color and imagery, OTOH, I get! How things have changed. Steve --- Steve Johnson - DA Document Imaging Systems Support
