So, there I was in 1986, at film school, with the first semester’s tuition paid for and two hundred dollars in my bank account. On my second day in New York, I went looking for employment to Columbia’s job board and found a listing for “scribes.” Of course this was providential, I thought. I called from the first pay phone I could find, set up an interview, and didn’t ask what kind of scrivening they needed. No matter how dead-letterish the situation was, I wasn’t going to prefer not to.

The job, it turned out, was not mere copying — the company provided specialized secretarial services for doctors hired by medical insurance companies. We, the scribes, took the handwritten notes from doctors’ examinations and typed them up under their letterheads so that they could be submitted as legal statements when insurance claims were taken to court. We deciphered the handwriting, constructed full sentences out of the doctors’ telegraphese, inserted a lot of boilerplate text, and sent it off to the respective doctor to review and sign and submit. The work paid well over minimum wage, and I found I could do it in an automated haze which required almost no mental effort.

Three months after I began working, the company acquired its first personal computers (PCs) for us to work on. I had typed my papers and stories on a terminal attached to the huge mainframe computer at college, and had taken a couple of programming classes, which I thought were tepidly interesting — I was good at writing bubble sorts for lists of words, but it all seemed quite abstract, of no immediate practical purpose. The mainframe was controlled by a specialized cadre of tech-heads, and my access to it was distanced and narrow. Now, though, at my scrivener job, I had a computer I could play with.

I blazed through my assigned work (no more worrying about typos and omissions), propped up stacks of paper to signal that I was busy, and dove into the arcane depths of DOS. Here was a complete world, systems and rules I could discover and control. I could write little batch files to run commands to change directories and copy files. And the software we used to write the reports, WordPerfect, I could control that too, write clever macros to put in the date, to recognize my abbreviations for the medical jargon, to pop in whole paragraphs of text. And now any repetition of effort seemed like an insult. Spend half an hour writing a report that didn’t quite fit the standard format? No way. Screw that. I’d rather spend six hours tinkering with if-then-else routines in my report macro so it would support this specialized format too.

Soon I was the de facto tech-support guy for our little office, and was advising on future purchases of hardware and software. I bought computer magazines on the way home, and lusted after the monster PCs in the double-page photo spreads: more speed, bigger memory, huge hard disks. I wanted all these, but even on the decidedly low-end machines I had access to, there was an entire universe to explore. There were mysteries, things I didn’t understand, but there were always answers. If I tried hard, there was always a logic to discover, an internal order and consistency that was beautiful. And I could produce these harmonies, test them, see them work. When a program broke, when it did something unexpected, I could step through the code, watch the variables change, discover where I had made unwarranted assumptions, where the user had done something I didn’t expect, and then I could change, adapt, and run the code again. And when I fixed the code, when it ran, the victory coursed through my brain and body. I wanted to do it again.

I left New York with a taste for this wizardry and an idea for a novel. I’d figured out in fairly short order that the collaborative, cash-intensive business of filmmaking wasn’t a good fit for me. Being around people all day tired me out, not writing fiction made me ferociously cranky, and the ideas I had for screenplays required gargantuan budgets. The novel I wanted to write moved back and forth between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, featured cavalry battles, a typing monkey, a character dismembering himself, and many other special effects that I could pull off myself, without a crew or funding. So I finally accepted my fate: a lifetime of fiction-making anxiety and possible poverty was what I was built for, and running about on a film set wouldn’t rescue me from writers’ demons. There was a fortifying relief in knowing this, and I went off to a couple of graduate writing programs to get on with the work. I did a year at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and then moved on to the University of Houston.

I wrote my novel and lived the life of the itinerant graduate teaching assistant (TA), which meant many wonderfully tipsy, passionate highbrow conversations in low-end bars during post-paycheck fortnights and a steady decline in the quality and quantity of food thereafter. I was with my tribe, happy, writing steadily and hard, but clearly my revenue streams needed some new tributaries. Most of my fellow TAs had second teaching jobs, but these were poorly paid, and biweekly confrontations with towering stacks of freshman composition papers had engendered in me a bitter hatred for all students. I looked around for other writing work, and requested information from publishers of porn and romance novels. I was quite willing to do this honest, easy labor, but found that literary-novel-writing apparently exhausted my creative resources, which ran to about four hundred words a day and were subsequently incapable of delivering even formulaically heaving bosoms and thrusting rods.

I was saved by a fellow graduate student who had noticed my burgeoning geekiness. By now I was walking around campus with eight-hundred-page computer manuals tucked under my arm and holding forth about the video-game virtues of Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards in the grad-student lounge. My friend asked me to help set up her new computer, and I arrived at her house with a painstakingly curated collection of bootlegged programs and freeware utilities and an extra-large bottle of Diet Coke. She just wanted to be able to write short stories and print them out, but one of the preeminent signs of computer mania is a fanatical exactitude, a desire to have the system work just so. I tricked out her machine, emptied my bottle of soda, and then gave her my standard lecture about on-site and off-site backups and the importance of regular hard-disk checks and defragging. She looked a bit overwhelmed, but a couple of weeks later she called to ask if I would help a friend of hers, the owner of a local bookstore, with his new computers at the shop. “They’ll pay you,” she said.

Pay me? For letting me play with their new machines, no doubt still boxed and unsullied and ripe for my superior setup skills? This seemed incredible, but I gathered myself and said, “Sure, sounds good.” This was the beginning of a busy and profitable career as an independent computer consultant, which in short order led to paid programming gigs. As many consultants and programmers do, I learned on the job — if I didn’t know how to do something, Usenet and the technical sections of bookstores pointed me in the general direction of a solution. I was fairly scrupulous about not billing clients for the hours spent educating myself, more from a desire not to overprice my services than moral rectitude. I did provide value — word of mouth gave me a growing list of clients, and I was able to raise my hourly rate steadily.

I set up computers for elegant ladies in River Oaks and gave them word-processing lessons; I went out to factories and offices in the hinterlands of Houston to observe assembly lines and then modeled workflows and production processes. The programming I did was journeyman work; I mostly wrote CRUD applications, menu-driven screens that let the users Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete records that tracked whatever product or service they provided: precision-engineered drill parts for high-heat applications, workers for the oil industry, reservations at restaurants. Simple stuff, but useful, and I always felt like I was learning, and making good money, sometimes even great money. I could afford biannual trips to India. Programming in America paid for my research and writing. I managed to get through graduate school without taking any loans, finished my novel, found an agent.