September 1985
Linda was almost twenty-seven years old. As one of her friends on the floor used to say "tick, tick, tick!" Seth pestered her for marriage two more times during that summer of 1984.
She still lived in her quaint little row house apartment overlooking the city, she still drove Myrtle every time she needed to go somewhere any kind of a distance away. There had been a time when Myrtle belched black smoke and bucked all over the hairpin turn leading up to her street and she wondered if it was time for the old girl to meet her maker. After a repair job that cost only a couple of hundred dollars, Linda decided to keep her.
At work, dark and early on a Wednesday morning, the director of nursing took her aside near the employee lounge. "I'm telling everyone on an individual basis," she said. "We're all to start computer training in a couple of weeks."
When Linda thought of computers, she still thought of those great big honking machines taking up a whole room, with huge reels of tape on them. "Won't that take a really long time?" she asked.
"No. Just a couple of hours during your choice of days throughout the week."
During the first class, which was held in one of the old offices near the cafeteria, Linda met with a bunch of grumbling, sour-faced co-employees. Marlene, a tall lady with a short, black haircut that made Linda think of a black helmet, was the biggest whiner: "I went to school for nursing just so I could get away from office type shit like this."
Kelly, a girl who'd graduated from school a couple of years after Linda, said "That's the way everything is headed. You might as well get used to it. One of my teachers said he thinks that by the year 2000, there's going to be computers in every house."
Marlene looked at red-haired and freckle-faced Kelly as if she'd just said that the United States would sign a treaty with Russia. "What the hell for?" she asked. "Are we are going to be taken over by nerds by then, or what?"
For Linda, the extra computer classes took away from her relaxing time. At least twice a week she would go for lessons, and she used her days off for errands. Some days she liked to sit and do nothing, or yak-yak on the phone with friends or watch trashy television shows in her pajamas.
The highlight of her week was still Friday night. In the summer and early fall like this, she would just walk down the stairs and overpass to get there and catch a ride home with one person or another. She'd been a student at The Next Step for over two years by then and the male instructors loved to dance with her at the parties.