Sometime in February 2014
It's Friday afternoon, and I'm seated across from my new Boss at a members-only restaurant my parents used to take me to as a child. I never much liked the place. The food is sub-par, the service patronizing, but that's not what you pay for there. You pay for the air of exclusivity, to be part of an in-crowd. Boss is a pretty down-to-earth guy but he likes to keep his head afloat in the upper echelons of the local business society.
The east wall of the place faces a large lake which you can see through expansive bay windows. Sunny days lend to an almost blinding effect in the restaurant and it is not uncommon to see patrons dining while wearing sunglasses.
The Boss is a portly man in his 60s with grey hair and thick-rimmed glasses---not sunglasses, but the kind with the glass that lighten/darken in response to the environment. They're still shedding their tint from the walk across the parking lot. He's taken to referring to me as Russ---in emails addressed to me, in emails to my future coworkers, occasionally to my face. Very close to my given name, just the wrong vowel. Apparently he has a few clients named Russ.
This is the welcome to the team lunch. I'm not surprised to be here, though I'm grateful. I felt the interview the week prior went extremely well, even if I couldn't quite work out what they were looking for in their next web manager. My resume included a healthy dose of marketing and content management---usually through WYSIWYG editors not much different from the very platform I'm using to type this.
Did I list Basic HTML on my resume? Of course! <b></b>, <p></p>. I can bold shit and make paragraphs, a couple of things I retained from the Intro to Web Design course I took in college...fourteen years ago. Bam! Basic HTML knowledge.
"What program do you use to manage your website? I'm most familiar with content management systems," I asked Boss and Junior, his son and second in line at the company, during the interview. In web speak, that means I honestly don't really know how to code a damn thing but for better or worse Boss and Junior are not fluent in web speak.
"What's it called," Boss says to himself, and partially to Junior. "Oh..umm---Dreamweaver...and some other programs."
Note to self: look into this Dreamweaver.
I didn't look into Dreamweaver between the interview and our lunch today. The server comes around and takes our drink orders. Boss doesn't order alcohol (decaf coffee) and I realize this work environment will be very different than my last. If only I knew how much different. I order a soda.
"I brought some papers and instructions from the last web person," says Boss, revealing a half-inch thick stack of paper-clipped documents with a sticky-note attached to the front page that reads For Russ.
"Great!" I say with a smile, sensing the blood starting to rush to my face. Somehow I stem it at the neck while staring down at the pile of papers.
Papers containing line after line after line after line...of code. Not your kid-glove bold/italic/underline shit. Stuff I've only seen over the shoulder of a professional (read: real) web developer at my former job with the ad agency. Stuff broken into sections like "How to Add a New Page" followed by paragraphs of code. Stuff I can make little sense of overall.
We don't talk about what's on those papers because we don't have to.
The feeling, I'd later realize, was one of simultaneous terror and triumph. I was in way over my head. Clearly. But at the same time, the fact that the job was offered to me could mean only one thing: Boss had not a fucking clue about what it took to run his website. And that meant there was a chance I could make it work.
Later that day I got a text from a friend asking what I was up to that weekend.
Teaching myself to code.
Thus began the Life of Russ, Web Manager and Customer Service Representative.
