I'm Justin Harrison, and I'd like to state for the record that I'm not a programmer. There's no need for concern, though. I've been working at Tripod for over a year now, and I'm well on my way to tech rehabilitation. It's a long process, and there doesn't seem to be much of a support network for those of us who don't know code (at least compared to other debilitating conditions), but I'm on my way. With a bit of luck, maybe one day I'll be able to hold my head up high and proudly proclaim that I understand computers. That's my goal, anyway. The reality is that I have a long way to go.

A little background: I'm part of that pariah department known as "Marketing." You might have seen some of us out there in the world. We're the ones always asking questions. "When can you have that done?" "Would you take a look at this product?" "What's a servlet?" I ask so many questions that when I venture back to Tripod's East Wing, where the techies hang out, it's oddly empty. Bad timing, I guess. At least I hope it is. Not that I blame them for trying to evade my questions. After all, much of what goes on back there is well beyond me. I don't code.

It wasn't always this way. Back in the heyday of the programming language Logo, I was a whiz. I designed all kinds of shapes, forced the screen to change color for no particular reason, and generally made the poor Logo turtle dizzy. Since then, I've lapsed — fallen off the information highway, as it were. I'm not sure exactly what caused it. Perhaps it was the realization that this country had actually elected Reagan to a second term, or maybe it was some undiagnosed allergy to hairspray that sparked a strange chain reaction in my behavior. Whatever the reason, I gave up on computers in the mid-'80s. Sure, I'd sneak back to write a paper and read a forwarded e-mail from time to time, and by the time I turned 21, the laser printer was a loyal ally. But these were only moments of clarity, short-lived and soon forgotten. I didn't have a clue about what I was doing, and had not yet acknowledged my need for serious tech-rehab.

My friends were no help at all. Take my college roommates, for example. Each of them, like everyone else at Bowdoin, was given an e-mail address (my class was the first one for which e-mail was mandatory). But my friends would have none of it. One of them would drag me along to the library once or twice a year, watch me log him in, and would then proceed to spend an hour or so deleting his messages from the past semester. Another friend of mine wouldn't even make that effort. In all four years, he never once opened his e-mail account or read a single message. No, motivation to kick the low-tech habit did not come from my friends.

It took a job at Tripod to get me going. I started, as everyone must, by admitting that I had a problem. That wasn't so hard — communication in most of the meetings I attended slowly progressed from English to some strange dialect in which the semi-colon and question mark were viewed as legitimate characters of the alphabet. Next came a plan. I would learn about the Web from the ground up. Again, working at Tripod seemed the obvious way to go. Books about HTML, trial sites, and various tutorials soon followed. I was off and running.

After several months, things are going pretty well. I'm learning Java now. Yet I must admit, I'm not without relapses. To me, compiling all human experience into a series of ones and zeros just doesn't sit right. Oh well, I guess I'll be "recovering" in perpetuity.

Anyway, enough about me. I have just one plea for all those programmers out there. If you run across any of my fellow marketeers, give them the benefit of the doubt. Chances are they won't be able to follow you, but you never know. Maybe they're in rehab, too.

— Justin