Clear but cold. The issue, thank God and all His angels, will go out tonight.

Faren is on edge. Charlie wants her to learn Pagemaker, but the fact that she knows next to nothing about pasteup will make it difficult for her to extrapolate the process onto the screen. There were some tense conversations with Charlie in the back. Feel sometimes like I’m locked in a cage with them.

Was he thinking of firing me? That would have been dumb beyond belief, not because I was some super-competent employee, but because I was the one person in that office who knew Pagemaker . Faren was an editor and writer. Asking her to move from that to wrestling with a DTP program was insanity.

I had learned Pagemaker in spite of Charlie, who seemed to think computer programs could be acquired by a sort of osmosis. He’d downloaded it onto the computer, then expected me to know it just by turning on the computer and exporting Wordstar files. Fortunately, shortly after purchasing Pagemaker, he left town for a convention during a long weekend. While he was away, I literally broke into his house/office every morning, climbing in through his kitchen window and clambering over the sink. For three days, the bulk of my time was spent sitting in that back office, poring over documentation and practicing. By the time he returned I was, if not proficient, at least competent.

I still wonder if he ever put two-and-two together and figured out how I did that. Charlie could be stubborn and madly unreasonable, but he was not stupid.