Joseph Aqua:  

I earned a B.S. at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1975. My major was Botany. I continued my education at North Dakota State University, Fargo, where I studied applied plant genetics and receive a M.S. in 1978. While working at the U.S. Census Bureau as a Survey Statistician, I returned to the University of Maryland, part time, and worked for a B.S. in Computer Science, which was conferred to me in 1984. During that time I transitioned to become a computer programmer analyst, but with the old job title. I spent most of my work life designing, implementing, and maintaining business application software. In the beginning, it was fun, exiting, and looked foreword to going to work. To think I was actually paid to do something I really did not consider work. The job also carried a lot of responsibility and I was living in a world of work that demanded zero errors (and I knew it would be a bad day way my section leader and branch chief were standing at my desk when I arrived at work for the day). My work at the U.S. Census Bureau ended in late 1984 when it was time for a change. I accepted a job working for the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM) at Fort Leavenworth, KS, as a Computer Programmer Analyst (and finally got the job title I wanted). My job involved reviewing mounds of contractor generated source code written in ADA for a field Tactical Computer System. I did not know ADA (thought I was a proficient FORTRAN programmer) and on top of that it was b-o-r-i-n-g work and Kansas is not the most exciting place to live. I asked myself over and over again, what did I do? For sure, the Midwest was not for me. I was highly motivated to get the heck out of Dodge. By the following spring I landed another job at the U.S. Army Forces Command (FORSCOM) HQ at Fort McPherson, GA, just outside Atlanta. Unlike Kansas, it was a great place to live. There I was introduced to developing computer programs on a personal computer, a far cry from developing mainframe applications. It was fun but I found being the only programmer in a subject matter organization required extraordinary patience extracting functional requirement out of big shot users, both military and civilian. One of them, a mortal enemy, eventually became my supervisor. That sort of thing does not happen working in a large applications development organization where a programmer is insulated where the user community must produce functional requirement from the get go. By the time things boiled over working for that a--h---, the Civilian Personnel Office (CPO) had already received a request for a "release date" for me to transfer to the U.S. Air Force 7th Communication Group (7CG) in the Pentagon. I had been planning my escape in for a while. I hated to leave the Atlanta area but I had to in order to save whatever sanity I had left. I really enjoyed working at 7CG though it was stressful and I liked working in the Pentagon building. My division supported the Comptroller of the Air Force and I developed several finance and accounting packages on a PC platform for "special programs". After a couple of years, I got an opportunity for a promotion, working at the Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) across the Potomac River in downtown Washington. Essentially, OIG is a Federal law enforcement agency. I worked on a lot of both IBM mainframe and PC applications, though I was a cog in the wheel as far as the mainfram...Expand for more