Thank you. A full 27 years now. A rambly story.

I was hired by CTP on October 1st, 1999, into a part-time coordinator position.

Written in my own style and unedited. You get the natural me, dyslexia and all. If you want to know what the past 27 years mean to me, you need to hear it in my voice to get teh full experience.

1995-1999

The darkest days of my life. Today, I will leave it at, the DOR referred me for services at CTP. I attended the Programming Training and graduated with Class 39. I fell in love with CTP and what it did.

1999-2008

Going with the flow, just doing whatever it seemed like I should do to make things better and do my job.

The first thing I did at CTP was take on a small mountain of old desktop PCs that all had issues and had been put aside since no one knew what to do with them. I rehabilitated as many as I could from parts, using some to build the others. Cleared up the mess, got some machines back into service. Felt good.

At some point our server was running into issues. An old NetWare machine, a huge server case the size of a small refrigerator, and IIRC a Pentium 100, 

Pretty sure this thing: https://archive.org/details/netserverlhii 

It had lost its network and accumulated a massive backlog of unsent emails. Every time the network reconnected, or it rebooted, it crashed because it couldn’t process the email. Something like that anyway. The IT contractor quoted CTP >$10k for a new machine, so I helpfully said, “Hey, why don’t we just set up a Linux server and do this cheaply? I can do it.” And so they said, “Sure, go for it.”

I ordered a Linux install CD… yes… ordered it physical mail.  Caldera OpenLinux? Of course I had no idea what I was doing but I figured it should work. And it did, with only quite a few (many) very long days and nights to get there, and then an ongoing process of refinement. There was no AI, Google was barely a thing. I was out in the wilderness.

The new “server” ran on an old HP desktop computer, and I professionally mounted the mechanical hard drives outside the case, with the wiring hanging out. I think this was a Pentium II and a former Windows NT 4.0 machine. I came to greatly appreciate Linux and its services. The more understanding and true, deep understanding of how things worked meant that the work was easier and easier and worked better and better. That’s a beautiful thing.

(In my IT career, I have never lost user data BTW)

On the teaching side, I started in the administrative and computer skills classes. I made up for what I lacked in educational background with my care and concern for each individual. I always believed that people could figure it out if they tried and had the support they needed, and pretty much that has proven true always.

Early on, I had a formative experience. A student really struggled but kept showing up each day. I spent a huge amount of time with her, helping her along the way. She made progress, slowly, but her self-doubt stayed constant. At the end of the program, a review board evaluated a student’s work, and it was the last step in the class. She was ready for it, in my opinion, but she didn’t show up for it, and we never heard from her again. 

I was really upset about it. The wise staff of CTP counseled me. Joe Quinn said something to the effect that the upset I was feeling was because of my own expectations and not how she felt. For her showing up to class, trying, and making progress, it may have been a success on her own terms. It wasn’t up to me to decide what it was for her.

As COBOL was aging out and in 2002-2003 the perception was that all programming jobs were going overseas for outsourcing, a change was needed.  I began developing a curriculum for computer repair, something I had been doing off and on since the beginning of the PC era. 

The Network and Technical Support Training I developed launched in 2006 and continues today at Computer Technician Training. It has evolved over the years from being primarily computer repair to fully remote system administration, network, and help desk support.

2008-2014

The big crisis. The Department of Rehabilitation provided case service contract funding for CTP. i.e., fixed income to be available to provide services. That 30-year-old contract was canceled with 30 days’ notice, with no plan for how to continue to exist. The CTP board began working on CTP’s shutdown plan. However, I had other plans.

With no real approval but no real resistance, I rejected the idea that “CTP had a good run. Time to go home.” I saw there was plenty of community need, and we were doing good work helping people. There was no reason to shut down. It was imperative to me that we figure out how to keep going.

Three of us did it. Me, Christine Tabony, and Jasper Hill. We spent countless hours trying to find a way. 

We crafted a reformulated set of services, a modular open-enrollment system, and a business plan. Christine negotiated rates with the DOR, Jasper provided an endless stream of creative ideas and solutions, and I created the structure for how it would work.

Maybe that sounds simple, but that kind of change is intense, especially when you have no idea how things will work or if they will work, and under time pressure and financial pressure.

In the end, and over time, all of our modern services were crafted. They have been further revised and refined, but the basics were all there.

2014-2020

I never aspired to be the Director of CTP or even a Director of anything. But much like that pile of old computers in the corner when I 1st started at CTP, I saw something needed to be done, and I just started doing it.

One of the first tasks I assigned to myself was to interview other directors to ask them about their jobs. I figured I should find out what this job was supposed to be. I came to realize that every director is different, and how they see their job depends on them and the organization they direct, rather than the job being one well-defined thing. 

That suited me. That is me. I adapt to the need. That also means the job has unlimited capacity for feeling many things, many good, many not. It is a very stressful job, and in the nonprofit world, most directors do not last, and when they leave, they do not continue in nonprofit work. That’s a statement about our society more than them.

One cannot know the path untaken, so I will conclude I’ve done ok in this job. Why not.

2020

My era of being wrong.

March 9, 2020, I decided that CTP would shut down due to COVID if UC Berkeley made the call. Later that afternoon, UCB closed.

I went into the classroom to let students know that we’d be closing for a few weeks until things cleared up. Remember when we used to say, “Go back to normal.”?

While I was letting people know, quite a weird feeling, one of the students sneezed fully onto me. I could feel the droplets hit my face. Stuff like that doesn’t psych me out too much, but on that day I recall thinking, “I am going to die now.”

I didn’t, and we didn’t go back to normal.

CTP began a rapid move to fully remote services. Another intensive process, and we relaunched with Zoom shortly after we closed. The metaphor lives on “Building the plane while flying it.”

I felt fully sure that remote services would never work well for CTP, and at most it would be something we would limp by with until “things went back to normal.”

Thought I was wrong about dying and things going back to normal? I was way more wrong about how remote service would go.

Turns out that remote service works better in many ways and, on average, is better for more people than in-person services. We studied it and found that services, even for people with beginner-level computer skills, do no better or worse in person vs. remote. Adult education and services work well in a staff-led, real-time session. It is easier to get to. It is more accessible. It offers features not available in the real world. If you disagree, you are wrong, sorry.

“Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those doing it”

Good lessons learned, but some rough, rough times.

We lost people. I still regularly think about them. 

Sometime after that-sometime before now

Everyone is a uniquely shaped puzzle piece. Some pretend to be more regularly shaped than they really are, but we all have our own unique set of strengths and weaknesses.  That’s a fundamental truth I have proven to myself through the thousands of people I have worked with at CTP.

Point is, we all fit somewhere. In some cases, the people or environment around them may need to flex in order for them to fit properly, but it can be done if there is the willingness or necessity to do so.

In this era, CTP became a beautiful tapestry of people working together. 

I have my own opinion on how I would like to see the world work. While my ability to influence the world is very limited, I can do some things here at CTP. I decided when it came to staff that I wanted to be as humane as I could and to have the organization accommodate the people rather than forcing them to accommodate it.

I was not willing to do it any other way. It would either work, or I was out.

What it took was people who were true believers in the mission, like me.  No one told me my job was to look around and do what it looked like needed to be done. I just did it because I believed in what CTP did. I believed that what it did for me it could do for others, and I wanted to be part of that. I have done everything needed (that I could do).

When you have people like that, things just work. And it feels good. Imagine feeling good at your job? Sounds like that is rare.

And that’s yet another reason I have stayed in the fight for CTP.

Now

It has been 27 years. It has been a full 27 years. CTP is under unprecedented threat from the very system that we have worked so hard to support. As with many things in my job, I look at that, and I find it hard to accept, but that is what we have to do. We are where we are, and we have to do what we have to do. 

I didn’t choose to lose my vision, but I did (mostly), and my choices were to wallow in it or accept it and figure out what was next.

People do best when they have support. True for everyone.

People with disabilities face an uphill battle, for a complex array of reasons, including societal attitudes, lifetimes of missed development opportunities others take for granted, the expenditure of time, effort, and life energy battling the systems that are supposed to be there to help us… the list goes on and on, and yet in there I did mention that these challenges were *because of disability*.

CTP is here and has been here for more than 50 years being that missing support and without us, the world will be worse off.

Aubrey Green used to call CTP, “The last house on the block.” Past us people are on their own.

I have lost focus and gone back to CTP. This email is all about me, me, me 🙂

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to help so many people. My life is immeasurably better because of these 27 years. I would not do it any differently if I could go back and do it again.

Thank you to those who have come before me and done so much to help me personally when I needed so much help – Joe Quinn, David Landes, Neil Jacobson, Joni Breves. I remember my 1st day at CTP like it was yesterday. In fact, I remember it better than yesterday. Hmm.

And to those who have kept CTP alive, past and present, embodying the true spirit of independent living and the core principles that allow each person at CTP, whether they are staff or program participants, to feel respected as the person they are. 

We can’t know what the future holds. We only know what we can do today. Make the time you do have count.

–Alex Tabony