Who I am. Rick Sokol, 39. Married to Carla eighteen years. One son, Nick, 16. We live on the Ohio side of the river, in the Ohio Valley, where you can see West Virginia from the kitchen and the stacks from everywhere.

I started at the mill in 1981 in the labor gang and worked my way up to running the coiler on the hot strip. Seventeen years. Last fall the foreign steel came in cheaper than we could make it, Japan and Russia and Brazil, and in November they laid off my whole turn. The government certified us for Trade Adjustment Assistance, which means they pay for retraining and the checks keep coming as long as I stay in school. So I'm in school. Community college, computer networking, going for my A+ certification first. After a spring semester and two summer sessions the registrar says I have enough hours to be called a sophomore. I made this page myself in Notepad for my HTML elective. My instructor said a journal would be good typing practice.

Carla had a Sunday off. First one in five weeks. She slept till ten and I made eggs and kielbasa and she ate it in her robe at the table and didn't look at the clock once.

Went to Pop's after church. He had the golf on, the Ryder Cup, which neither one of us cares about, and the Americans were way behind going into today and then they came back and won it. Pop said "Well, look at that." I watched the whole back end of it with him. I don't know a thing about golf. I know about being down going into the last day.

Nick told his grandfather I passed "the computer test" before I could. Then he told him what IRQ stands for. Pop nodded like he understood. He didn't. Neither did I a year ago.

Stosh, my buddy from the hot strip, called tonight. Said his grandson's computer won't make any sound, and did I know anything about that. I told him check the sound card settings, and if that's no good bring it over. Then there was a long quiet on the line, and he said, "What'd that test run you, anyhow?" I told him. He said "Huh," and "Well, go Browns," and hung up.

Huh. I'll take huh.

Typing speed: 28 wpm. Next exam: DOS/Windows, sometime before Thanksgiving if I can swing it.

PASSED.

A+ Core Hardware. Drove to the testing center in Pittsburgh this morning in Carla's car because mine makes a noise on hills. Sat in a little room with a computer and a lady watching through a window, and I clicked through it, and my hand was shaking on the mouse so bad I had to put the other one on top of it. Then you hit the button and it thinks about it. Longest few seconds since the day they posted the layoff list.

The lady at the desk handed me the printout. I said "Is that a pass?" even though it says it right there. She said "Yes sir, congratulations," like she says it forty times a day. I didn't care. I sat in the car in the parking garage and read it three times.

Carla worked a double today so she wasn't home. I still pack the lunch bucket, old habit, and I opened it in the garage before I went in, just to have something to do with my hands. There was a note under the sandwich. I'm not putting what it said on the Internet. I'll just say it helped.

One down. One to go. Then a job, if there's a job. But one down.

Listening to: the country station in Carla's car, the only one it gets. Lonestar, "Amazed." Didn't even change it.

Midnight. Kitchen table. Index cards everywhere. I filled Nick's old baseball card shoebox with IRQs and DMA channels and the six steps of a laser printer.

Nick came down for a glass of milk and stood there reading my cards upside down. Then he sat down. Then he picked up the pile and said, "IRQ 14."

"Primary IDE."

"IRQ 6."

"Floppy."

We did that for most of an hour. He's a hard grader. When I missed one he made me say it back twice, which is what I used to do to him with his times tables. Neither one of us said anything about the backpack. At 1:15 he said "You got this, Dad," and went up to bed, and I sat there a while with the cards.

Typing speed: 26 wpm. Testing Friday.

Turns out Nick's buddy has an older sister, and the older sister is in my keyboarding class. So by Tuesday the whole junior class knew Nick Sokol's old man is in typing with the eighteen-year-olds and sits in the front row and types with his tongue sticking out. (I do not do that. I might do that.)

Tonight I picked him up from practice and he got in the truck and before he even had the door shut he said, "Can you not bring the backpack when you pick me up." Not mad. Just tired, like he'd been thinking about how to say it all day.

I didn't say anything for a mile or so. Then I told him I carried a lunch bucket through that mill gate for seventeen years and nobody ever asked me to hide it. He looked out the window. I felt bad as soon as I said it, and I also didn't. Both. He's sixteen. At sixteen your father is supposed to be a certain thing and stay that thing. I was a certain thing. It went to Brazil.

Carla got home at 11:40. I told her about it. She said "He'll come around, he's you," and fell asleep sitting up on the couch with her shoes on. I took them off for her. Her feet are shot. She's doing doubles so I can do this. I think about that every time I sit down at a keyboard.

Browns are back. Browns lost 43 to nothing. To Pittsburgh. Nick is a Steelers fan, which is a thing I have to live with in my own house, and he was very gracious about it, meaning he only brought it up about eleven times.

Watched it at Stosh's. Stosh and me stood next to each other on the hot strip for twelve years. He's 51, twenty-two years in, too young for his pension and, he says, too old to start over. His unemployment ran out in the spring. He won't sign up for the training.

At halftime (we were already done by halftime) he asked how school was. I told him about the networking lab, how we crimped our own cables, how you have to get eight little wires in the right order. White-orange, orange, white-green, blue, white-blue, green, white-brown, brown. I say it in the shower.

He said, "Rick, I'm a steelworker. I'm not going to go sit in a room with kids and play Nintendo." And then, "They'll call us back. When the tariffs come, they'll call us back."

I didn't argue. I used to say the same thing. Maybe he's right. I hope he's right. But I'm not sitting in the recliner waiting to find out, and I think that's the thing he can't forgive me for, a little. Or maybe I'm making that up. We had another beer. The Browns kept losing.

Typing speed: 19 wpm.

9/9/99. The kids in lab said all the old computers would crash today because some programmers used 9999 to mean "end of file." Nothing crashed. Nick wants the new Sega. $199. I said "We'll see," which means no, and he knows it means no, and he said "I know, Dad," which was worse.

The local's picnic at the park, same as every year. Hot dogs, halupki from the Ladies' Auxiliary, horseshoes, somebody's cousin with a guitar. Same as every year except you could see the line. Not a real line. But the guys still working stood by the grills and the guys laid off stood by the horseshoe pit, and nobody planned it that way, and everybody saw it.

They called some men back at the other end of the plant in August. Not my department. Not my seniority. I was happy for them. I was. You can be happy for a guy and still go stand by the horseshoes.

Pop came. He introduced me to one of his old buddies as "my son, he's going to college for computers now." Last year he said computers were for guys who never lifted anything heavier than a pencil. This year he said it like he was proud. Maybe he is. He also asked me to look at his VCR, which blinks 12:00, and I fixed it, so maybe that's all it is.

Drove home past the mill. Labor Day and half the stacks cold. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel. So I'll write down what I did: I went home and practiced typing for forty-five minutes, asdf jkl;, while Carla slept before her shift.

First day of fall semester. Keyboarding I, 10 a.m. I've been putting it off since January because I figured I could get by with two fingers. I cannot get by with two fingers. My advisor said, very nice, "Mr. Sokol, you'll be typing all day in this field," and signed me up before I could argue.

Twenty-two students. Twenty-one of them were in high school last spring. They type like hail on a roof. I sat down and the girl next to me, Tiffany, pink fingernails, looked at my hands like I'd brought a pair of work gloves to the table. Fair enough. They are big hands. I'm missing the top of one fingernail from '89 and the knuckles don't all go where they used to.

Mrs. D. gave us a two-minute timed writing to see where we start. Tiffany: 61 words a minute. Me: 14. With errors. Mrs. D. put her hand on my shoulder on her way by and said "The F and the J have little bumps on them, so you can find home without looking." I did not know that. Nine years I ran a coiler worth more than my house, and I did not know there are bumps on the F and the J.

After class Tiffany said, "My dad got laid off too. He drives truck now." Then she showed me where to put my thumbs.

Typing speed: 14 wpm. Nowhere to go but up.

Meeting with Paulette at the job services office to sign my training paperwork for fall. Paulette has a bowl of butterscotch on her desk and has seen a hundred of us come through that door since last fall. Same flannel shirts. Same look.

She had my transcript from spring and summer. A and B and A and B-plus. She turned it around so I could see it, like I hadn't seen it, and said "Look at you." I'm thirty-nine years old and I sat there and got red in the face over a report card.

Carla picked up another double this week. The nursing home is always short, and the TRA check covers the mortgage and not much else. She says she doesn't mind. She minds. She's forty and she's on her feet sixteen hours and then she comes home and asks me what I learned. Tonight I told her about subnet masks. She fell asleep before I got to the good part. I don't blame her. There's no good part to subnet masks.

I started this page tonight. I don't know who's going to read it. If you're another mill guy sitting at a kitchen table trying to figure out a form, I'm not ahead of you. I'm about two steps in front, and it's dark up here too.