Flashback to the summer of 1988: I finished my four years of college but I hadn't amassed enough valid credits to graduate. I returned home to Brooklyn and started working at a temp agency in the City. Meanwhile, my sister was working at a traffic engineering consulting firm and she asked if I wanted to make some extra money interviewing passengers for a survey whilst waiting for their flights at Newark International Airport (now Newark Liberty International Airport). Who can't use an extra couple of bucks? So I said, "Sure."
My friend and I were assigned to Terminal A and most of the flights there were on Piedmont Airlines. We had a blast meeting new people and feeling like we were doing something special, and indeed we were. The survey answers were recorded on a Radio Shack TRS 80 Model 100, the first "laptop" I ever used. We thought it was so cool with its eight lines of LCD text.
Now it's 26 years later. I haven't flown through EWR in many years, and I don't think I've been back to Terminal A since my days as a survey taker but some things never change. Here I am and it's still hot, it's still noisy, and it's still full of travellers waiting for their (delayed) flights.
Something else that hasn't changed is that I'm still using a computer while I'm waiting, but it's not a laptop or even a tablet ... it's my smartphone and who knows how much more powerful it is than that early portable personal computer I used so many years ago.
All of this seems so familiar, yet strange at the same time. So here's to Val, Art, and Jerry, who helped make some great memories during that assignment.
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