An accounting instructor was driving me crazy, telling jokes, you know, fun guy, but he wouldn't explain anything. He'd say "The book explains it," but it wasn't explaining it. When I asked him, he'd just be charming. I got sick of that and it made me depressed because I knew I wouldn't get any instruction.

I said, "Can I see you in your office?" He shared his office with three other accounting instructors and in front of the three others I said, "I want to talk to you about what's going on in your class and why I can't come back. You're not doing the teaching that I need and expect. " And wow! You never saw anybody move so fast. He said, "Susan, let's go down to the cafeteria for coffee." Darn it, I was so damn mad. Desperation is the mother of creativity. I mean, I liked this guy but I was going to have to shake him up. I had to make it so I didn't have to go back there every day and get tortured by what he was doing.

He wasn't just doing it to me. Practically all the other women and the younger men would never dream of speaking because you just don't challenge that kind of authority. You know; "You're the student and I am The Teacher. "You sit there and listen until somebody like me says I don't understand, explain it to me again. People would come up to me and say, "Thank you Susan." I was by far the oldest student and older than the instructors mostly. It gave me an edge, it gave me the confidence to challenge.

So I did make a name for myself there. Anger made me do it . . . and outrage. I was there for more than two years and would have finished on time, but I had to have a hysterectomy. I had to go another three months, but then I had a two-year technical diploma in computer information systems. That qualified me to program computers.

Of course, never doing what people expect me to do, I decided that sitting and programming computers for seven hours a day would make me crazy so I've got to use this to find another kind of job that I can tolerate. If I were programming computers I'd be making ten thousand dollars a year more than I can make now but I just couldn't make myself sit there, and I was afraid maybe some of that technical stuff wouldn't stay in my head. So I got into this part-programming / part-administration stuff.

I went out and tried to find a job and I didn't get a whole lot of interviews. When we started talking about programming I'd be very enthusiastic and then just before the end I'd shoot myself in the foot. Something within me would say, "Oh God don't even dream of getting this job" and I would say something really inappropriate and dopey.

I knew I couldn't program, but I had to make myself go out and do these interviews because that was what I was trained for: So there I am with my diploma looking for a job - for three months. I borrowed a thousand dollars from my brother to see me through and I was getting more and more desperate, thinking, "How long can I go on doing interviews for jobs that I don't want?" And then came a little thing through the college from a systems company wanting an assistant to work at the Ministry of Social Services with IBM stuff and the main frame and this and that. The college has a little service for alumni, job postings that they send out to you because employers call the college and want somebody cheap.

So, I went for the interview and got the job. Then I had to make it so I didn't end up programming all the time. I would look around the office for things that needed to get done that weren't being done and I would do them.

Pretty soon I had made myself indispensable and I had a job with some variety in it. I could get up and move around and I could stand to do it. Then I asked for a raise. By the end of three years I had a job I liked and I had doubled my salary. But now I think I have to figure out a way to do more programming!