Fender Tucker Unplugged: My Day Job

by Fender Tucker

"Don't quit your day job." That's what you say to a guy who has a dream of making it big in some field,
when you're not too optimistic about his chances. Would you believe I was a musician for 25 years and
never heard that dreaded sentence? That's because I never had a day job.

I knew a lot of musicians in my time and 98% of them wanted to make a hit record and be a star. They
all worked during the day and somehow managed to play at night. They'd usually last three or four
years in the music business and then disappear, probably staying home with their families.

But my bands were always three or four guys who didn't give a damn about "making it big." All we
wanted was to not have to get a day job. And we never did. We just played for decade after decade
until our gravity failed and our negativity couldn't pull us through. I was 40 years old when my back
said, "No mas!" to holding that guitar from 9 to 2 every night. Lucky for me, the LOADSTAR Tower
was in need of a Mojo that year, 1987, and I got my first day job. Boy was I lucky!

The 8-bit field is a little like the music business. There are some real good programmers out there, and
understandably, most of them want to "make it big." Unfortunately, there's no such thing as "big" in the
8-bit field. So the ambitious programmers move on to the IBM field, where they'd better have a day
job. 

But there are still that 2% who have no desire to do anything more than write fun programs for a fun
computer. You'll meet these programmers on LOADSTAR. Okay, they probably have day jobs, but
they don't spend their free time learning C++ and the latest Windows protocols. They write programs
for LOADSTAR, and I for one appreciate them.

Sometimes, a good programmer moves on gracefully. Nathan Fiedler, author of geoCanvas and Geos
Utilities (reviewed on LS #124 and #129), has announced his departure into the IBM miasma. But
instead of leaving his excellent programs as limboware, he has placed them into the Public Domain. You
can probably download his stuff if you have a fast modem, lots of time and can find it online, but we're
going to provide his best programs on LOADSTAR in the next couple of issues. Next month we'll have
geoCanvas, the tool that geoPaint would like to be. Xxxxxxxwhere?

We wish Nate the best of luck and success in his new job at Geoworks. He was one of the best
all-time GEOS programmers and I'm sure he will help make Geoworks better.

I had a point to make when I started this "day job" article and it's this: In order to have a quality
magazine that publishes as much as LOADSTAR does, you need a guy who's dedicated (and
unambitious) enough to devote 40+ hours a week to a job that has no future, no pension, and the salary
of a typical LA cop. I'm that guy. Jeff is, too, although every now and then I detect a glimmer of
ambition from him.

Our job is to keep going and going, and offer a few hundred bucks a program to the loyal programmers
who are getting better every year. We're the only company to spend up to $2000 a month to make sure
that we get the best software written. Stay with us, tell your 8-bit friends about us, and buy our
products when we come out with a good one, and we'll unambitiously amble on for years to come.
That's all we're trying to do. Believe me, it's better for you that we don't want to get rich and set the
world on fire.

You wouldn't believe the pressure I get from all sorts of angles to get out of the "dead" Commodore
field and into the IBM world, where "more people could enjoy my work." I think they think they're
talking to an ambitious computer yuppie with decades of career ahead of him. I don't see myself that
way at all.

I just turned 50. I've done everything I wanted to do in life. I had a Huck Finn childhood, a John
Lennon adolescence, a Jack Nicholson adulthood, and now I'm looking forward to a Timothy Leary
old age. I want to work for ten more years and then get really serious about reading. I wouldn't be
comfortable in a scene with testosterone-crazed junior capitalists whizzing by me on their way to some
dubious success.

(Fender Tucker is the Grand Exalted Mojo of LOADSTAR and the only person in the western hemisphere who
communicates more slowly by Email than by Snail Mail. This phenomena has allowed us to claim with some degree
of honesty that the above is used by permission, and should not be reprinted without his approval)

via The Commodore Information Center web site (http://home.att.net/~rmestel/commodore.html)