The Age of Computers

Estimating, (or Quantity Surveying if you were in Great Britain) was soon my life and I loved it. I had an office and a computer and I could take a set of drawings in to my office and close the door. Then I could take the plans apart, not physically, but within my head. Like most estimators, I was able to visualize the completed project and just about everything in labor and material it would take to get to that finished state. I was in my own little world and until I was finished, the door would remain closed.

But, back to the computer…sure I was given one, an IBM clone. But I wasn't given any instructions. I was going to have to figure it out by myself. And after a few frustrating weeks, I decided that there was no way that I could learn at work; too many interruptions. I was going to have to learn at home, so we decided to buy a computer. We convinced ourselves that we could learn to use it together for personal purposes as well as for business.

I went shopping and ended up buying an Epson Equity II with a 40 MB hard drive and 12 MB of RAM. With Turbo! It was top of the line and it cost us $2,500 (20 years ago). Long story short; it did help us, though it was painful at times.

And back at work, I could now begin to navigate through the programs that had been installed on my pc. Programs like Symphony, which contained a program called Lotus 1-2-3. And Pro-Write, a simple word processor. I didn't care for the Symphony word processor. At home I would read about spreadsheets and then practice. Later, at work, I would try out my new knowledge.

As luck would have it, I was the only one of the four estimators that wanted to use a computer. In their offices, the computers were silent and the screens were dark. I would get no help from those Neanderthals. I would go to our secretarial staff and ask them the tough questions. And I learned a lot. Probably too much as I was soon the resident 'geek' and if anything went wrong with a computer, I was the first one called to solve the problem. I quickly learned that 'reboot' solved 75% of those problems while checking the power supply would solve another 20%. For the remaining problems, we would call our West Coast Comptroller in Anaheim, a corporate 'geek' and the one that was pushing the use of computers everywhere. Pretty soon he noticed that he was getting very few calls from the Sacramento office and he figured out that I was the reason for that. We became friends. I think he enjoyed talking about computers to someone who knew what he was talking about.

That friendship became a lasting one, and it changed my career in ways I couldn't even imagine at that time..