Darn. I will be out of Dodge then; I have a date with the Lincoln Hwy - the first real vacation my husband and I have ever taken.
(Even our honeymoon consisted of overnight at a hotel near the UNR campus in Reno because at the time I worked for an engineering supervisor who threatened to fire me and forced me to reschedule my wedding - twice. We finally eloped and one of the happiest days of my life was when they fired that supervisor - apparently they had been building a case against him and didn't tell me because they were afraid I would *alert* him - when the reality was I would have delightedly worn a wire, hidden camera, whatever they needed to fire the abusive apparent speed freak weirdo. Mama, don't let your girls grow up to be programmers. The sexism and abuse is unbelievable - I think I've been groped from stem to stern; ridiculed; asked if I'm having my period; questioned by young male recent graduates about why I know about computers because I'm about their mother's age - or older - and she doesn't know about computers; queried as to whether I'm a lesbian; and asked to pose observations of errors in male colleagues' algorithms and code by asking them to explain it to me because I don't understand it! My husband once came to visit me at work and suddenly understood why women tend to leave the field within three years of graduation after observing the line out my cube of people asking me questions and the manager who came by trying to figure out why I hadn't gotten his request complied with - after he told me my first priority was helping out the new hires and people who weren't clear on what their code should do because in order to "save disk space" management deleted the spec because at the time they decided everyone knew what they were supposed to be doing. I've thought of writing a book - but no one would believe it. Oh, and then there was the Russian programmer at another company I worked for who told everyone he owned the company and when he discovered a number of his friends were coming from Russia expecting jobs decided to schedule his vacation then....)
(Even our honeymoon consisted of overnight at a hotel near the UNR campus in Reno because at the time I worked for an engineering supervisor who threatened to fire me and forced me to reschedule my wedding - twice. We finally eloped and one of the happiest days of my life was when they fired that supervisor - apparently they had been building a case against him and didn't tell me because they were afraid I would *alert* him - when the reality was I would have delightedly worn a wire, hidden camera, whatever they needed to fire the abusive apparent speed freak weirdo. Mama, don't let your girls grow up to be programmers. The sexism and abuse is unbelievable - I think I've been groped from stem to stern; ridiculed; asked if I'm having my period; questioned by young male recent graduates about why I know about computers because I'm about their mother's age - or older - and she doesn't know about computers; queried as to whether I'm a lesbian; and asked to pose observations of errors in male colleagues' algorithms and code by asking them to explain it to me because I don't understand it! My husband once came to visit me at work and suddenly understood why women tend to leave the field within three years of graduation after observing the line out my cube of people asking me questions and the manager who came by trying to figure out why I hadn't gotten his request complied with - after he told me my first priority was helping out the new hires and people who weren't clear on what their code should do because in order to "save disk space" management deleted the spec because at the time they decided everyone knew what they were supposed to be doing. I've thought of writing a book - but no one would believe it. Oh, and then there was the Russian programmer at another company I worked for who told everyone he owned the company and when he discovered a number of his friends were coming from Russia expecting jobs decided to schedule his vacation then....)
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