PKT25: Fall 1998
At the end of my sophomore year, I was overwhelmed with stress and had lost my scholarship. A co-op seemed like a good idea to me. I procured a gig at Lexmark Printers in Lexington, Kentucky, through the power of nepotism - both my aunt and uncle worked there and hooked me up. Further, I was able to stay with my aunt and uncle in their house rent-free; I only had to pay for my share of groceries. So it was that in mid-May 1998 I found myself living in my cousin Becky's old room, 5+ hours away from Cleveland, Ohio.
A co-op, for those not familiar, is basically a fancy term for an internship. I was still technically enrolled as a student at CWRU, but I didn't have to pay any money to the university. Because I was in computer science, it was a paid internship - I've never seen an unpaid internship in my field then or now. Most students in computer science or engineering disciplines at CWRU did at least one co-op and many did two, which is one reason so many of my peers took five total years to graduate from college and so few did chose a junior year abroad option like my sister did. Most co-ops, like mine, lasted 8 months, either spring-summer or summer-fall. Quite a few of my fraternity brothers had co-ops in Cleveland and still lived in the house and participated after work, but some of us did take the opportunity to get out of town.
While working at Lexmark Printers, I made $11/hour, which at the time was the best paying job of my life. I worked 40/hours a week from late May through mid-December. With the rest of my time, I did relatively little. I was in a city where I didn't know anyone but my aunt & uncle and a few coworker. I wasn't 21 yet so I couldn't get into the bars. If I was 20 again and repeating this today, I'm sure I would have put up a dating profile or something, but back then online dating wasn't even a thing, and it's not like I had internet access at my aunt & uncle's house anyway.
I no longer had a scholarship and needed to save money, so cheap activities were great. I got a library card and started reading for pleasure for the first time since high school, absent a few books borrowed from gieves freshman year. I went to a lot of movies at the $1 theater and started keeping my movie lists. I realized that one of the reasons I was so stressed my sophomore year was that it was the first year of my life that I hadn't been working out, so I joined a gym and worked out regularly. I went to a few Reds games and ran one 5K, and that was about it. You can bank a lot of money when you don't have much in the way of expenses for eight months, even at $11/hour.
The co-op itself was pretty lousy. I was assigned a big project at the very start of the co-op to build an internal tool for testing some cases involving weird encodings in foreign languages. I knocked it out in a week, which allowed plenty of time for testing and edge case handling on my part. I presented it, and then I learned that they'd expected that project to last me 8 months. Seriously. They only found one extremely minor bug in it in the 8 months I was there, which took me half a day to fix.
From there, I did a lot of scut work that nowadays is usually automated by the tools. Think "manually running find and replace on websites to fix contact info because I'm not allowed to use grep commands." Eventually they told me to build some VB interfaces for Lexmark build tools, which was at least a little more interesting, but I still had plenty of time to do my own things. I wrote some games, and I spent a lot of time on ESPN reading Rob Neyer and learning about advanced baseball stats for the first time.
Unsurprisingly, my final review for Lexmark was not positive, as in "you spent a lot of time on the internet." I pointed out that I had asked for new work literally every morning that I didn't have it, and had done every piece of work I was assigned quickly and well, but such is life. I learned a LOT of things about how to treat interns during that job, and I hope I didn't make any of those mistakes when I had my own interns at my day job. This job basically made me uninterested in being employed in computer programming at all and seriously made me consider dropping out of college, which I mostly didn't do because of the fraternity and because I didn't have any kind of useful alternate plan.
I did go back to Cleveland occasionally over those eight months of co-op, usually for parties, but I was largely uninvolved with rush or any other activities in the Fall 1998 semester. Fortunately, a few text messages to Jimi confirmed for me who was in the Fall 1998 pledge class, which only had 3 members.
Jimi - A junior from New Jersey with some kind of management / IT major. BB: Brandon.
Bob - A junior physics / music major from Virginia(?), Bob is the only other serious Oakland A's fan I've every been close friends with. BB: Unknown.
Will - A freshman, I think he was from the Cleveland area. I don't remember what he majored in. BB: Rowan.
We had 22 brothers at the start of the semester, including me on co-op. With these three, we made it to 25 leading into the Spring 1999 semester, which was a high to that point in my time at the house.
The other thing that happened in the Fall 1998 semester was that I got myself elected president of the fraternity for the spring 1999 semester. Obviously, I wasn't there at elections so I left a prepared speech. I'd spent the month prior emailing all my fraternity brothers to get their input on me running, so my campaign certainly wasn't a surprise to them. To this day, I'm confused about why I got elected when there were many brothers available who would have done a better job than me.
Another more more important thing that happened at the very end of the Fall 1998 semester was that Neal & Rachel's daughter G was born. She would be a regular fixture at pretty much every fraternity event through my graduation.
The Ohio Alpha Beta Chapter of Phi Kappa Theta
The House Tour
Outside,
Main Floor Bedrooms,
Main Floor Public Rooms,
Basement Public Areas,
Basement Private Areas,
2nd Floor Big Bedrooms,
2nd Floor Small Bedrooms,
3rd Floor First Hallway,
3rd Floor Second Hallway,
Attic & Errata,
House Tour Commentary: Joe & Laura & Astrid,
House Tour Commentary: Jackal,
House Tour Commentary: Susan,
House Tour Commentary: Assorted
The Pledge Program
Bid Night, Schedule, Curriculum & Black Books, Big Brothers & Pledge Pins, Paddling, Initiation
Semesters
Fall 1996, Spring 1997, Fall 1997, Spring 1998, Fall 1998
Events
Detour, Blackout, Boo at the Zoo, Chapter Meetings, Serenading, Greek Week
Other
Full Series, My Rush Experience, Chapter History, Family Trees, National, Greek Life at CWRU, Fraternity Offices, Part 1, Fraternity Offices, Part 2, Fraternity Offices, Part 3, Demographics, Seniority
Additional Commentary
Black Books, Boo at the Zoo & Blackout, More Boo at the Zoo & Blackout, Chapter Meetings
A co-op, for those not familiar, is basically a fancy term for an internship. I was still technically enrolled as a student at CWRU, but I didn't have to pay any money to the university. Because I was in computer science, it was a paid internship - I've never seen an unpaid internship in my field then or now. Most students in computer science or engineering disciplines at CWRU did at least one co-op and many did two, which is one reason so many of my peers took five total years to graduate from college and so few did chose a junior year abroad option like my sister did. Most co-ops, like mine, lasted 8 months, either spring-summer or summer-fall. Quite a few of my fraternity brothers had co-ops in Cleveland and still lived in the house and participated after work, but some of us did take the opportunity to get out of town.
While working at Lexmark Printers, I made $11/hour, which at the time was the best paying job of my life. I worked 40/hours a week from late May through mid-December. With the rest of my time, I did relatively little. I was in a city where I didn't know anyone but my aunt & uncle and a few coworker. I wasn't 21 yet so I couldn't get into the bars. If I was 20 again and repeating this today, I'm sure I would have put up a dating profile or something, but back then online dating wasn't even a thing, and it's not like I had internet access at my aunt & uncle's house anyway.
I no longer had a scholarship and needed to save money, so cheap activities were great. I got a library card and started reading for pleasure for the first time since high school, absent a few books borrowed from gieves freshman year. I went to a lot of movies at the $1 theater and started keeping my movie lists. I realized that one of the reasons I was so stressed my sophomore year was that it was the first year of my life that I hadn't been working out, so I joined a gym and worked out regularly. I went to a few Reds games and ran one 5K, and that was about it. You can bank a lot of money when you don't have much in the way of expenses for eight months, even at $11/hour.
The co-op itself was pretty lousy. I was assigned a big project at the very start of the co-op to build an internal tool for testing some cases involving weird encodings in foreign languages. I knocked it out in a week, which allowed plenty of time for testing and edge case handling on my part. I presented it, and then I learned that they'd expected that project to last me 8 months. Seriously. They only found one extremely minor bug in it in the 8 months I was there, which took me half a day to fix.
From there, I did a lot of scut work that nowadays is usually automated by the tools. Think "manually running find and replace on websites to fix contact info because I'm not allowed to use grep commands." Eventually they told me to build some VB interfaces for Lexmark build tools, which was at least a little more interesting, but I still had plenty of time to do my own things. I wrote some games, and I spent a lot of time on ESPN reading Rob Neyer and learning about advanced baseball stats for the first time.
Unsurprisingly, my final review for Lexmark was not positive, as in "you spent a lot of time on the internet." I pointed out that I had asked for new work literally every morning that I didn't have it, and had done every piece of work I was assigned quickly and well, but such is life. I learned a LOT of things about how to treat interns during that job, and I hope I didn't make any of those mistakes when I had my own interns at my day job. This job basically made me uninterested in being employed in computer programming at all and seriously made me consider dropping out of college, which I mostly didn't do because of the fraternity and because I didn't have any kind of useful alternate plan.
I did go back to Cleveland occasionally over those eight months of co-op, usually for parties, but I was largely uninvolved with rush or any other activities in the Fall 1998 semester. Fortunately, a few text messages to Jimi confirmed for me who was in the Fall 1998 pledge class, which only had 3 members.
Jimi - A junior from New Jersey with some kind of management / IT major. BB: Brandon.
Bob - A junior physics / music major from Virginia(?), Bob is the only other serious Oakland A's fan I've every been close friends with. BB: Unknown.
Will - A freshman, I think he was from the Cleveland area. I don't remember what he majored in. BB: Rowan.
We had 22 brothers at the start of the semester, including me on co-op. With these three, we made it to 25 leading into the Spring 1999 semester, which was a high to that point in my time at the house.
The other thing that happened in the Fall 1998 semester was that I got myself elected president of the fraternity for the spring 1999 semester. Obviously, I wasn't there at elections so I left a prepared speech. I'd spent the month prior emailing all my fraternity brothers to get their input on me running, so my campaign certainly wasn't a surprise to them. To this day, I'm confused about why I got elected when there were many brothers available who would have done a better job than me.
Another more more important thing that happened at the very end of the Fall 1998 semester was that Neal & Rachel's daughter G was born. She would be a regular fixture at pretty much every fraternity event through my graduation.
The Ohio Alpha Beta Chapter of Phi Kappa Theta
The House Tour
Outside,
Main Floor Bedrooms,
Main Floor Public Rooms,
Basement Public Areas,
Basement Private Areas,
2nd Floor Big Bedrooms,
2nd Floor Small Bedrooms,
3rd Floor First Hallway,
3rd Floor Second Hallway,
Attic & Errata,
House Tour Commentary: Joe & Laura & Astrid,
House Tour Commentary: Jackal,
House Tour Commentary: Susan,
House Tour Commentary: Assorted
The Pledge Program
Bid Night, Schedule, Curriculum & Black Books, Big Brothers & Pledge Pins, Paddling, Initiation
Semesters
Fall 1996, Spring 1997, Fall 1997, Spring 1998, Fall 1998
Events
Detour, Blackout, Boo at the Zoo, Chapter Meetings, Serenading, Greek Week
Other
Full Series, My Rush Experience, Chapter History, Family Trees, National, Greek Life at CWRU, Fraternity Offices, Part 1, Fraternity Offices, Part 2, Fraternity Offices, Part 3, Demographics, Seniority
Additional Commentary
Black Books, Boo at the Zoo & Blackout, More Boo at the Zoo & Blackout, Chapter Meetings