I, too, was a poster child.
Found this "Mass DEP Retirement" poster today, while cleaning my office. From the Apple Macintosh SE in the background, the photo would have been my first year at DEP, or just before I got the job there. I think I was still at Earthworm Recycling, but moving to DEP at One Winter Street soon after.
While waiting for my hiring package to go through (a process which took months, and which I personally made an effort to shorten by running my own paperwork for new hires), I was writing a novel. A short time after my retirement party here, my apartment in East Boston was broken into and someone stole the Macintosh.
It was like having a file cabinet stolen. The computer was worthless, it was obsolete at that point, as far as resale value. But I was unable to find the novel in the floppy disk drives, and had since moved to Microsoft.
Started the novel again recently, about 15 years later, from memory.
I got too busy to finish the novel when DEP work got going. Later, a few months after the party here
This, by the way, is the same desk today. I originally scavenged that wooden desk out of a dumpster at the JFK Building in Boston - where EPA offices were. I vividly remember tying up the loading dock while I positioned the paper recycling truck I was driving to where I could leverage the wooden desk out of the dumpster. I finished my masters using this desk, and then it was my home office desk until about 2002.
Now it is a monitor demanufacturing table.
I wonder how many novels we destroy. It's the same desk, swear. EPA - Robin - deman. If you are retiring from EPA, take a look, it may be yours. No one ever, ever worked as hard on it as it is worked on today...
