The short version of my bio goes something like this: I've been a computer software engineer for about 33 years, currently employed by a small company in Marlboro, MA, developing virtualization software for configuring and managing servers. I'm married to the former Elaine Poulin of Chelmsford, MA. We've been married for those same 33 years, and have no children. We are currently living in Ashland, MA, in a house that we had built in 1986. I spend most of my spare time maintaining this house and property :-(, but occasionally get out and try to play some golf, or go for a motorcycle ride. Both of my parents are still alive and living on Cape Cod. Some of you who attended Wayland elementary schools as a child may recall my Dad, Walter Doucette, as your principal.How I got here takes a little longer to explain.
Before graduating from Wayland High School, I was accepted to be a cadet at the U. S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT. I entered this military institution less than two weeks after our graduation day, with the idea that four years (including summers) of hard work and training would earn me a Bachelor of Science degree and an officer's commission (as an ensign) in the U. S. Coast Guard. Well, let's just say that things didn't quite work out that way, and the Coast Guard lost a good man. I resigned after one year.
Ah, the summer of '69. Woodstock. Peace, Love, and Music. In my opinion, the best music of our lives was recorded and released between 1966 and 1975. Being a member of the "Woodstock Generation" is a large part of how I define myself today, but at the time, I didn't have a clue about this revolutionary new movement going on. During high school, I had always loved music of all types, and paid close attention the AM radio playlists, popular at the time. However, my year at the military academy kept me somewhat insulated from the counter-culture that was taking shape. When I returned to civilian life, the music of the era began to re-assert its grip on me.
Becoming a civilian again also meant that I was now eligible for the draft, but I was pretty sure that I didn't want to experience the sights and sounds of Vietnam. With the Selective Service breathing down my neck (my draft lottery number was 88), I quickly found a good, inexpensive engineering school nearby, and was accepted for the fall semester on short notice. It was known then as Lowell Technological Institute, or Lowell Tech. Today it is UMass Lowell, part of the statewide university system. Since I had done well in geometry and algebra in high school, I chose to major in Mathematics.
Freshman year was easy, because I had taken some of the same courses during my year at the academy. I soon discovered that Lowell Tech had a small, student-run radio station, then known as WLTI. With access to a large record library, most of the DJs followed the lead of WBCN in Boston, low-keyed underground FM radio tapping into the undercurrents of society. I thought to myself: Here was an opportunity to expand and refine my musical tastes, and experiment with new and unusual ways of presenting it to a large audience. I think it was my sophomore year when I began hosting my own weekly radio show on Saturday nights. The show ran for at least three years, and featured mostly alternative rock, American and British, sometimes fading in and out with natural sounds, space effects, or electronic instrumentals. Preparing for and broadcasting that show is one of the fondest memories I have from those years. While still an undergraduate, I was able to parlay my college radio experience into a short, part-time job at a commercial radio station, WLLH in Lowell, reading the news twice per hour during "J.C.'s Golden Oldies" show.
Also as a freshman, I met my future wife under some very unusual circumstances. It was January 18, 1970, and eastern Massachusetts was experiencing a snowstorm. I was hitchhiking from Dean Junior College in Franklin, MA, back to my dormitory in Lowell. Standing on the Lowell Connector, covered in snow with thumb protruding, two Chelmsford high school girls took pity on me and decided to give me a lift. It didn't matter that they were heading in the opposite direction when they first saw me; they turned around and gave me a ride to my dormitory about four miles away. I started dating one of them, Idris Mason, but after a couple of months, she decided that I wasn't her type. That's when Elaine Poulin grabbed me on the rebound. For the next five years, Elaine and I had an "on again, off again" relationship, but we ended up getting married in Chelmsford on the summer solstice in 1975. To this day, she is still at my side.After four years of hard studying (and yes, hard partying, too), I earned my Bachelor of Science degree. Now it's 1973, and just what does someone do with a degree in Mathematics? Become an insurance actuary? Even though that really didn't sound very exciting to me, I spent about six months looking for such a job, one that would validate my chosen major. At the same time, I worked in a series of low-paying odd jobs to support myself. These included taxi driver, short-order cook, and ice cream man. I was known as "Big Jim" to all the kids, selling ice cream in the neighborhood streets of Natick from a modified Datsun station wagon in the summers of 1972 and 1973. I recall giving a lot of thought to radio broadcasting as a career, and remember applying for work, without success, at a Boston-area radio station.
Finally, in February of 1974, I had had enough. The New England winters were bleeding me, and I had California on my mind. I had this grand plan to pack up all of my belongings into a U-Haul trailer, and drive out to California to establish myself there. I would find a small apartment, get a job, enjoy the warm weather, play a lot of Frisbee, and become part of the laid-back California lifestyle. It's funny sometimes how fate will intervene: less than one week before my planned departure, my car was totaled in Weston at the route 30 / route 128 interchange when someone ran a red light on me. So much for California Dreamin'.
Okay, so now what? I bought another used car, and continued to drive a cab while living at home with my parents in Wayland. But a significant turning point came when a college friend mentioned to me that the University of Lowell (the merger of Lowell Tech and Lowell State) was offering a Master of Science degree program in Computer Engineering. He suggested that since I had the engineering background, maybe I should sign up for the fall semester. It was true that I enjoyed working with computers. I had my first exposure to computer programming at the U. S. Coast Guard Academy in 1969, writing simple FORTRAN programs on punched cards and submitting them in batch form to an IBM 360 running on campus. I was able to further develop my programming skills in the early 1970s as an undergraduate at Lowell Tech, writing mathematical analysis programs. This new Masters program at Lowell focused on both hardware and software concepts.
So I took my friend's suggestion. In the fall of 1974, I moved into a small, one-room apartment above a pizza joint less than one block from campus, and found a full-time job as a night janitor at Wang Laboratories in Tewksbury. The next few months of studying and work started to yield results in the spring of 1975, when I was offered a teaching assistant position at the school. Later that spring, even though I was still at least one year away from completing the masters program, I started to peddle myself to computer companies, armed with only a B.S. in Mathematics and a piece of paper showing my computer course grades so far. GTE Sylvania in Needham was impressed enough to give me my first full-time computer software position in May, 1975. I was married one month later (see above), and completed the masters program in 1980 by taking my remaining courses at night.
That's it for most of the interesting stuff. I've been a certified computer geek ever since, and the computer industry has, for the most part, treated me very well. I was victimized by the technology bubble burst in 2001, laid off and unable to find a job for two full years. Those were scary times, and I found myself actually considering a career change. But in the end, I decided that writing code and solving logic problems was what I did best, and my career resumed in late 2003 thanks to a friend's job referral. I've worked at many local companies, large and small, over the past 33 years, both as a full-time employee and as an hourly contractor, but my best years were spent at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1982 to 1985 and 1986 to 1998. My specialties have been in embedded systems, storage, networking, and device drivers. I'm currently getting some great experience with Windows internals and Windows device drivers.
Within a couple of years, I hope to finally realize my dream of living in a warm weather climate. By the time we all gather again for our next reunion, Elaine and I hope to be living the good life in Florida. This does not mean retirement, it only means that we'll move, settle in, then figure out what we want to do next. Life is a journey. As on a motorcycle, the ride is more important than the destination.
P.S., Please do not depend on catching my attention through Classmates.com. I do not spend any time there, after creating an account for myself many years ago.
