My Life As A Hobby

I remember the first one I ever saw. It was 1972, and I was a sophomore in college. I was walking across campus when I spotted a nerd coming out of the engineering building with something strapped to his hip, like a gunfighter in a John Wayne movie. I’m sure he thought he was a NASA scientist. It was big. It was clunky. It was heavy. But that contraption represented one of the first steps in how our world was about to change. It was a Texas Instruments calculator, known officially as a TI 2500 Datamath.   Up until then, everybody did calculations by hand or used a slide rule, which was an amazing invention in its own right. Once you learned how to operate it, you could multiply and divide much faster than doing it on notebook paper.  For those of you who have never seen or even heard of this device (which includes millennials, and all who came after them), a slide rule looked like a mutated ruler. It was a long, narrow instrument, usually made of wood or plastic, with nu...

Fall is a wonderful time of year. It’s when October rolls around and the days start getting a little cooler and a little shorter. It’s a time when everyone thinks of those things we associate with autumn. Pumpkin patch festivals. Leaves changing into beautiful colors. College football. Even pumpkin spice lattes. And of course, let’s not forget little girls playing softball tournaments. As a devoted grandfather, I recently performed my grandparental duties and attended one of my little darlings’ final softball tournaments of the year. Holy crap. There were more tents at this place than you’d see on the Quad during Homecoming weekend in Tuscaloosa. Hundreds of parents, grandparents, siblings, and assorted relatives were camped out in folding chairs, huddled under blankets, and preparing for what appeared to be an upcoming military operation. The festivities began around 9 a.m. and were scheduled to conclude sometime around 3 a.m. the following morning -  assuming the champion...

  The phone rang in my office at 8:01 a.m.  I didn’t even have a cup of coffee yet.  That wasn’t unusual. In the brokerage business, things got started early and moved fast.  I recognized the number immediately. It was my largest account, which usually meant one of two things. Either somebody needed my help, or I had a problem. Quite often, those were the same thing. I picked up the phone and answered in the clipped, professional tone we were expected to use. “Joe Hobby.” It was George, a senior buyer. More often than not, an early call meant I needed to bail him out of some kind of trouble. Not this time. George had a question concerning my other occupation - stand-up comedy. Without so much as a greeting, he fired off a question. “Hey, what did you do to make James Gregory mad?”  James Gregory was one of the biggest comedy acts in the South. And he was a superstar in Birmingham, Alabama.  “Huh? What do you mean?”  “Well, he was just on a...