Marcy Shortuse
Bridging the Gap,
by Marcy Shortuse
As the 50-year-old of the group, I feel like
my generation - Generation X - bridged
the gap between a world with no home
computers, and a world fi lled with them. It wasn’t
until the 1990s that the squealing, static-y voice of
the dial-up modem fi lled the air in the living room or
den of a few homes. Sometimes it took 15 minutes
to connect, because the corporate servers were that
new and overwhelmed, and sometimes you never
could.
In 1997 I worked for an aerial telecommunication
tower company that was just getting off the ground
(if you’ll recall, that was when we were also transitioning
from pagers to cell phones in my generation).
The company expanded, doubled, tripled and
quadrupled in size during the short time I was there,
and by the time I left it was about to be purchased
by Westinghouse. I started as a front desk secretary,
but within two weeks became the executive secretary.
From there I transitioned to fi nance, then marketing,
then the head of marketing … that should be
a great example of how quickly the technological/cell
phone age was advancing at that time.
That whole time I
also worked for the IT
department, because I
was one of the few who
could wrap my brain
around even setting up a
simple desktop monitor
and PCU. I learned a
lot from the man who
was the head of the
department, and that
knowledge serves me to
this day.
Some time around 2007, a computer program
called MySpace sent shockwaves through my
generation. You could build a page around yourself,
the music you liked, and the pictures you took. You
could post your feelings, or a funny video … just
about anything that you thought your friends would
enjoy. It was, in fact, the beginning of a “look at me”
trend that continues on to this day.
Eventually Facebook came into its height of
popularity, and left MySpace in the dust. I still mourn
the videos of my children that I posted there that
were lost on old cell phones, and even though I
took videos of the videos with my cell phone before
MySpace proclaimed they would be taken down, the
quality is poor.