Wo-oah, what I want to know, where does the time go?
So goes the plaintive refrain of Uncle John’s Band and today I have the same question.
It really does seem like just yesterday that I changed my commute, from driving up 101 to the Whipple exit on my way to work at GTE Lenkurt to heading down Lawrence Expressway to pick up 280 north bound. North to Palo Alto, the location of my new job at Hewlett-Packard.
My path took me to the Stanford Park Division, on Page Mill Road. Here I performed component level repair of the test equipment used by the R&D engineers who worked at SPD before moving on to manage the HP 3000 and 1000 computer systems used by members of the lab to run simulations, etc. Stanford Park was a name I was slightly familiar with from seeing HP/Stanford Park name tags on fellow train riders.
(For a while I rode the train to work and Sheryl took me to the station in the morning and picked me up in the afternoon. Oh what long ago and seemingly innocent days those were.
Anyway, I digress as I was afraid I would when I started this piece. Speaking of digressions, I do have fond memories of those train rides. I would walk about a mile from the plant to the station where I would pick up an after work beer. I’d usually have a copy of the HP Journal I had checked out from the Lenkurt library and would sip my tall Miller and read about HP technologies on the way home.
As it was, my path to the station took me by a dog grooming/boarding place, and I’m pretty sure it was the one where Patty Hearst was doing her assigned work-release program. One day, I saw her out in the exercise yard with one of the dogs, but of course nothing happened, I just saw her.)
I wanted to mark a big day for me and my career at HP and instead ended up reminiscing about my previous job. I guess that’s fine as I still work for HP and will have plenty of time to reflect in the future.
So. The whole point of this is to observe a major milestone related to the aforementioned new job, only now it’s not so new as I still work for Hewlett-Packard, at HP Labs.
Today is the 35th anniversary of the day I joined HP, on the 3rd of December, 1979. Cue trumpets and fanfare, confetti and cake 🙂
Seriously. I barely feel 35 years old yet, so how can I have worked somewhere for that long? And speaking of labs, I moved to HPL in July of ’84, so I’ve been there 30 years. Whew.
I guess there’s nothing left to do but to keep on truckin’ on!
