Friday June 11, 2004

Me and Ronnie While everybody seems to be waxing lyrical (or apoplectic) about Ronald Reagan (and I did like Steve Bell's cartoon in the Guardian), I was reminded of a personal piece of synchronicity. We had just moved from the UK to the USA (for "just a few years," we thought - hah!), and it was my first day on the job, at Raytheon Data Systems in Mansfield, Massachusetts. I was joining the team to work on the OS for Raytheon's next generation minicomputer. It was March 30, 1981, and around 2:30pm, right in the middle of a meeting to get to know the rest of the team, everything stopped: Reagan had just been shot. From my perspective, as an outsider who viewed America as a pathologically gun-obsessed culture, it was an odd moment... what had I let myself in for?
(2004-06-11 05:54:50.0) Permalink