I’ve spent more than thirty years in IT, and nearly twenty of those years teaching people how to find things that hide in systems.
Malware. Intrusions. Misconfigurations. Weaknesses no one noticed until something went wrong.
So naturally, I started writing ghost stories.
I kind of fell into IT. I never graduated from high school, and the Navy was supposed to send me to get my GED, but that never happened. When I got out, I didn’t have a degree, a plan, or much of anything resembling a professional future. I did grunt work for whoever would hire me.
Then a CPA named Bill gave me a chance.
Bill was a friend of Pop’s. They had grown up together, and Pop always said he felt sorry for Bill because he came from a rough home. Whatever the reason, Bill took pity on me and gave me a job. I have never forgotten him for that.
When he hired me, he told me that with my first paycheck, I needed to get my GED. Study for it. Take it. Pass it. Otherwise, I would be back on the street.
Being twenty-one and still shy of stupid, I didn’t study.
Somehow, I passed with a perfect score.
Bill was surprised and he kept me on.
At first, I cleaned out old files, archived boxes, and took inventory. Dear Lord, that man had four storage buildings full of files, and I was doing this during the summer in Austin. If you’ve never worked inside a storage building in Texas heat, imagine being slow-cooked in Satan’s ass while counting tax records.
But Bill knew I could do more.
One Friday afternoon, I came in sweaty, tired, and ready to call it a day. My newlywed wife was waiting because I had promised to take her out. Bill handed me a small metal box and said, “Here, this is your generation’s stuff. Fix my computer.”
Me, being a Gen Xer and still shy of stupid, thought, Sure, how hard could this be?
Famous last words.
It took me four hours just to figure out how to open the damn computer. I had every screw removed, parts rattling around inside, and still couldn’t get the thing open. When I finally opened it, I decided to call it a day and come back Saturday.
I would apologize to my wife and tell her we’d go out the next evening.
Again, famous last words.
Saturday came and went. By seven that night, I still hadn’t figured it all out. Sunday went better. I finally installed the strange little Western Digital box, got everything connected, and because I had taken notes about which screws went where, I managed to put the computer back together.
The box, of course, was a hard drive.
I knew nothing about computers except how to play games and use WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, but by Monday morning, I strode into Bill’s office proud of myself.
Bill was standing outside his office, grinning.
“I see you got the drive installed,” he said.
“Yep,” I said. “But it wasn’t easy.”
Bill nodded. “You forgot DOS and Windows.”
I thought they came with the drive.
I don’t know why I thought that, but I did.
Back then, DOS came on floppy disks that were actually floppy, and Windows came on floppy disks that were not. Several hours later, I had the operating system installed, along with Bill’s specialized software, and I was ready to go back to inventorying storage buildings.
But Bill stopped me.
He told me to come with him. We got into his big pickup, because everything’s bigger in Texas, and drove to Dell Computer Corporation. We sat in the parking lot, and he told me I needed to apply. He knew someone there and would introduce me.
So I did.
And I never looked back.
Dell taught me documentation, communication, troubleshooting, and how to look for patterns in failure. Later, working in an engineering support department, I spent my time analyzing data from the factory, looking for what had gone wrong, and writing reports on how to keep it from happening again.
Every time I think about reports, I start twitching.
Aamamma IiI twiiitcchin’ nnnooow?
Around that time, I also started college. A class here. A class there. I wasn’t too serious about it yet. I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I’m still working on that part.
Then the IT bubble burst in 2002. Dell shut down my department. My manager, Bob, tried to move everyone into other positions, but I was the only one without a degree. The jobs were gone. Tech support had already been hit by layoffs. I had no degree, no prospects, and a child on the way.
Eventually, I found work in New Mexico and went back to school. Career counseling helped me find a job teaching at a career college.
That was where I discovered I loved teaching.
I taught students how to find things hidden in systems. How to look for failures before they became RGEs: Resume Generating Events. How to find the ghosts in the machine, if you will.
While I was in school, I also found Linux. I switched from Windows to Linux and never really looked back.
Later, I moved back to Austin and applied for an adjunct position at the community college. The interview was memorable.
I walked into a tiny office, dressed for success, and sat down with the department chair and another faculty member named Bob. Not Dell Bob. Different Bob. A Bob I had taken a class from while working for the first Bob.
Confused?
So was I.
The chair looked at my résumé and asked what I taught.
“Well,” I said, “I teach Linux.”
She jumped up and walked out of the office without saying a word.
I looked at Bob. He closed his eyes, shook his head, and gestured for me to stay seated.
A few minutes later, she returned with a book and a syllabus.
“This class meets Monday and Wednesday evenings,” she said. “Can you be available?”
That was the interview.
Since then, I’ve spent years writing lectures, labs, quizzes, tests, and enough documentation to make my eye twitch on command. I teach students how to understand Linux, Windows, networks, security, and the quiet disasters waiting inside complicated systems.
And yes, that career helped shape my fiction.
Something Pop once told me about music stuck with me. Music is everywhere. When you walk, when you drive, when the world makes noise around you, all of it becomes different pieces of music clashing together.
Teaching and writing work the same way.
In IT, you learn to look for what is hidden. A failed service. A dying drive. A noisy fan that means something worse is coming. A server quietly limping along while everyone hopes it survives long enough for the replacement part to arrive. IT is days of sheer boredom followed by minutes of sheer terror.
Honestly, that sounds a lot like horror.
A ghost story works the same way. Something is wrong beneath the surface. A house remembers too much. A room feels too quiet. A person carries grief like an unpatched vulnerability. A family ignores the warning signs until the whole system fails.
Cybersecurity taught me to ask: What am I not seeing?
Horror asks the same question.
Only in horror, the answer might be standing at the top of the stairs.
Evil Grin