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Burroughs

After Unix 5 was released business for Jim's company diminished and I finally had to let it go. I answered an ad for a technical writer at Burroughs Corporations and had a good interview and was hired.

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What culture shock! I had been working ten to fifteen hour days for at least five years and I went into Burroughs and no one was doing anything. There were about twenty writers on staff and I could easily done all the work myself. That was a real break for me.

During this period of my life I was going through panic attacks on a regular basis. It was just a twenty minute drive to work on the streets, no freeway driving necessary but I was in a constant state of high anxiety and had panic attacks regularly.

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The lack of a high-level output job allowed me to go home at lunch and lie down and sleep and relax and get back to the office just before it was time to go home. This allowed me to make it through this time. I played it very cool and went along with the program. I spent about an hour a day writing and kept up with my workload and my manager was happy with my work and my productivity.

Then something very interesting happened. The office was located in an area in Santa Ana that had poor electrical through put. That is we had a lot of electrical blackouts.

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The system we used to write our manual had been written by the former manager of the department who was a programmer. It was very crude and we had to do a carriage return at 80 characters. The word processor, if that's what you could call it, had very little more functionality than the one I had written to write my resume for Pertec. But it did have one special feature. When we finished the document our file could be read by a program that formatted it and turned it into a file that printed out as a 6x9 textbook, with all the illustrations we placed in it at the time of conversion.

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Well, I had been at the company for about two weeks when we had our first blackout. I had been working for a couple of hours on a manual and had not taken the time to save. When the lights went out I was stricken. All that work was down the tube. I had a big surprise coming.

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I was very open about losing all my work and my fellow worker just smiled and said just wait and see. A couple of hour later when the mainframe came up and my document came on the screen the cursor was in exactly the same place it had been when the system went down and I hadn't lost a thing. It seemed that Burroughs systems had battery backup that lasted just long enough for the system to do a clean shutdown if it lost power. I had never worked with a system that had this feature. It was great.

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UCI Medical School

Then it happened. I was called for jury duty and I went to the bookstore and looked for books to read while I sat around waiting to be called for jury selection. I saw a book titled the Panic Disease and I looked through the Table of Contents and decided to buy it. When I got home I just thought I would flip through it and see what this was about and I found the doctor who wrote it was talking about the condition I had and I read the book cover-to-cover right then.

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 The doctor described the symptoms and said that they were caused by an imbalance in brain chemistry. It is caused by a broken gene.  He said that my doctor didn't know how to treat it and that the place to go for treatment was to the nearest medical school. He said they all had started up new programs to treat the condition. I called University of California at Irvine medical school and sure enough they had a brand new program for the condition.

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I went to the school and was interviewed and tested for two days. In the end they said I had the condition and that I could become part of their program. I was given two medications and I was to see a resident psychiatrist once a week for an hour. The meds were great. The counseling was the pits.

Most of the residents I talked with were totally out of it. I mean they didn't have the slightest idea of what they were doing and I believe some of them needed psychiatric counseling themselves. I won't go into that here because it would be too long and involved and not worth the time. I think they chose psychiatry because thy wanted to try to understand themselves. The bottomline here is the meds did the job. That was 1986 and I am writing this in 2011. I just moved to a new medication for the condition two months ago. I took those two other meds for 25 years.

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