Digital Odyssey (eBook)

Tech Whiz Girl Bursts Own Bubble

SE Quinn (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
244 Seiten
Ballast Books (Verlag)
978-1-966786-52-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Digital Odyssey is a memoir by SE Quinn, a pioneering innovator who built the first live text streaming platform on the early internet-and lost nearly everything while doing it. Set against the explosive rise of Silicon Valley in the 1990s, the book chronicles her journey from a single mother working through the night to a tech visionary blazing a trail for women in the industry. As the founder of Wordcasters and creator of TextCast, Quinn developed a revolutionary system that captured spoken word and streamed it across the web with interactive chat-delivering accessibility and immediacy in a time of dial-up and static web pages. Her work-predating Zoom, YouTube, and Twitter-solved problems no one else was thinking about yet. But Digital Odyssey is more than a story of innovation. It's a raw, unsparing look at what it took to build something original while navigating motherhood, professional invisibility, and survival at the start of the internet economy. Quinn explores the cost of being early, the compromises she made to protect her family, and the deeper journey of confronting cycles of abuse and generational trauma-while refusing to view herself as a victim. Digital Odyssey reclaims a missing chapter of tech history and reframes what it means to invent, to be a mother, and to come home to the self you left behind.

Susan Quinn makes her home in the Mexican jungle with her dog, cat, chickens, and garden. She began her career pioneering real-time text streaming and later created one of the first multi-camera platforms for live streaming interactive video. Part of the founding circle of San Francisco's women-in-tech movement, Quinn is a mother of three-a role that has shaped her deeply and continues to unfold. Digital Odyssey is her first memoir.

Textauszug

CHAPTER ONE

Through the Looking Glass

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

C. S. Lewis

1989—San Jose, California

My first bad decision didn’t look like a mistake. It looked like a job offer.

Sylvia is a New Yorker, an attorney, and hard as nails. She leads my interview at a massive optical and dental practice in a lonely office park close enough to the San Jose airport to smell jet fuel, but not close enough to feel like you were going anywhere.

I push down the familiar déjà vu of settling for less and power through. I am twenty-one, broke, and still convinced I can outsmart my gut. For the right paycheck, I can tolerate this fluorescent hellscape. I ask for fifteen dollars an hour.

What I thought was a bold step toward financial independence was really my first yes to the wrong life. I knew it was time to get a real, grown-up job, and this was the best offer I had at the moment. I quit my first job at a car wash when all my coworkers were going off to college or getting adult jobs, and it just wasn’t as much fun as it had been when we were all in high school. I had never thought about a “career.” At the car wash, I hadn’t learned much, other than how to drink wine coolers and hang out with friends and drive over the hill to Santa Cruz for boozy bonfires.

I’d moved out of my childhood home for good three days after high school graduation when I was seventeen. College or a career were low on my list of priorities. One of the first things I did when I moved out of my parents’ house was, stupidly, sign up for a Costco membership. I thought that since I needed essentials like milk and toilet paper, my paycheck would cover it. How can I be broke? I still have checks! That bumper sticker reality was my actual financial strategy.

My car wash friends lived at home, so their paychecks were for pocket money—buying clothes and going out to dinner. I didn’t get it at first: that my paycheck wasn’t extra money, it was survival money. I rented cheap rooms from random, often unsavory people or couch surfed when I mismanaged my funds and couldn’t pay rent. Other than fleeting moments, I never felt safe or comfortable, but I knew how to be quiet, nearly invisible. When I decided to leave the car wash like all my friends had already, I pored over classified ads trying to figure out my next move.

I didn’t have any skills besides cashiering and vacuuming filthy cars, but I found a job as a receptionist at an optical store in Los Gatos called Site for Sore Eyes. It did not take long to get bored of answering the phone, so our manager, a Japanese Mexican man with a beautiful accent who always dressed in stylish suits with a tie clip and pocket square, took me under his wing and became my first real mentor. He loaned me a textbook called System for Ophthalmic Dispensing, which was loaded with descriptions, illustrations, and photos teaching subjects like “effective diameter” and “measuring interpupillary distance.” Each chapter ended with a quiz. I read the whole book and tried to copy my manager’s style of speaking to customers. In doing so, I subconsciously, and hilariously, started to copy his Japanese Mexican accent for a while before I noticed it. I registered to take the biannual certification test, drove up to UC Berkeley, and passed on my first try. I suddenly had a career as a California licensed optician, and Site for Sore Eyes would need to hire a new receptionist.

I loved my manager, but the store’s owner, Marty Dretch, was a sleazy guy who regularly parked his Jag in the handicapped space in front of the store—with no placard and no shame, even when there were empty spaces right next to it. He divorced his wife and co-owner of the company to date a receptionist at one of his other stores—a girl my age named Chessica. When he made her the new manager of our store, I knew right then I had to quit.

Now, sitting across from Sylvia, I feel mature with a full year of opticianry experience under my belt. Sylvia wants to give me nine dollars. I make her a deal.

“I will work here for a month for nine dollars an hour,” I say. “In thirty days, if I have not knocked your socks off, achieved the highest sales numbers you’ve ever seen, and delighted customers with my knowledge, professionalism, and charming attitude, then you can fire me on the spot, and I will walk away. But if I have reached those standards, in your opinion alone, you will sign me for fifteen dollars per hour, plus commission.”

Sensing no pushback, I add that I also want performance reviews every six months and an opportunity for a raise once a year.

After a beat, Sylvia thrusts her hand forward.

“Welcome to Skyport Dental and Optical Group.”

I can see that I have impressed her.

I do have a couple of obstacles in my way. One of them is Wende Rose. She’s even younger than I am and doesn’t have her optician’s license, but she does have the keys to the file cabinet—and a confident personality. Wende has been placing orders for optical supplies, frames, and contact lenses for about eight months already, and she is holding fast to that seniority. No one sits in Wende’s chair. She stays in the little alcove with the computer and phone, placing orders and calling clients for appointments and fittings. I see Wende as a threat at first, but then I recognize myself in her. Even at our tender ages, we develop a mutual respect for each other’s work ethic.

Ann Dixon is hired shortly after me. She’s never had a job in the optical business before. Ann is sweet and gracious with a beauty that shines from within. She drives a cute little blue Nissan sedan with a personalized license plate professing her love for the rock band INXS. Soon we are joined by Tammy, a Little House on the Prairie character all grown up.

I receive the raise I asked for. Sylvia doesn’t even wait for me to bring it up. After exactly one month on the job, she has the accounting department increase my hourly wage to fifteen dollars. Despite the owner’s investment in the staff, business doesn’t take off at Skyport Optical. On a typical day, employees outnumber clients six to one. That leaves a lot of time for my office friendships to bloom.

One night, we girls all go out to one of Ann’s haunts, the Oasis nightclub, and Tammy turns out to have an alter ego. In her frontier-style blouse and long khaki skirt, which stand out in the edgy, alternative rock nightclub, she gets super drunk, acts like a raunchy bitch, and fights with everyone. Then she brings a random guy home to my apartment and has sex with him on my white couch while she’s on her period. She never lives that down with the girls in the office, and I permanently borrow a throw blanket from my mother’s house to cover the stain on my sofa.

The optometrist in our office is a disheveled alcoholic who clearly has the wrong prescription in his own glasses. He has a tiny office in the building we share with the larger dental practice and surgery center. Our doctor comes in late almost every day and doesn’t even hide the bottle of cheap vodka in his office, where he is often found “sleeping” in the exam chair. We take turns waking him before appointments while another one of us distracts the patient with our collection of frames.

It is here at Skyport Dental and Optical Group where I meet my future husband, Cliff.

Cliff Mulford works in accounting, and he brings the mail to our side of the building every day. The optical office is overstaffed in case of a busy rush that never happens, so we spend most of our time polishing glasses, organizing and reorganizing the displays, dusting, and gossiping. When Cliff comes in, we women have very little work to do.

Cliff is quiet and has a sloppy gait. He’s slightly overweight, but I think that’s maybe just how he’s built. Cliff smokes cigarettes like Ann and I do, so we take breaks together outside and enjoy making conversation with the only guy our age in the office.

My first impression is that Cliff seems dull and harmless. A guy from Santa Cruz who doesn’t surf. I fell for the bad boys at the car wash and surfers before that. They never had their own cars and were always borrowing mine—a nuisance—so I am interested in trying something new. Cliff has a white Volkswagen Jetta. I decide to date him.

There are no fireworks, no spark, but he’s a reliable, pleasant guy who seems like a more sensible choice than the young surfers, musicians, and other charming disasters I attract. And I’m burnt out from being alone in the world.

I know I’m getting older, and I still haven’t had my first real boyfriend. I feel the pressure of aging even though I’ve just entered my twenties. Without any passion for a specific career track, no hobbies or life experience, and zero interest in higher education, the only thing I know for sure is that I eventually want to have a family. When I look at my daily routine, it feels like I’m going nowhere, and I have the palpable sense that I’m just taking up space and contributing nothing to the world. I’m bored with my studio apartment in a shady section of town and bored with life altogether. So, in practically no time, Cliff and I get a loft in downtown San Jose and start playing house.

It doesn’t take long to suspect I’ve made a grave error.

A month after we move in, I take my annual preplanned trip to Hawaii to visit my childhood friend Greg and the group of surfers that pile into the dorms each summer at the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 30.9.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-10: 1-966786-52-2 / 1966786522
• ISBN-13: 978-1-966786-52-8 / 9781966786528