I felt like a fish out of water for my entire professional life.

I entered university at a time when job opportunities were plentiful, and in the 6 years that I spent studying journalism and then history, the world started to change. By the time I graduated, no one wanted to hire an artsy generalist, and I didn’t want to be a teacher, which seemed to be everyone’s fallback career in those days. So I found my way into the expanding field of IT and moved through jobs in a haphazard way until 2007, when I retired. By that time, I was a manager, which wasn’t such a big deal to me – I was a very small fish and the company was a very big pond that I never felt at home in.

I spent my last few years on the job, helping our company downsize. Globalization had taken its toll on us as it had on everyone else, and more and more jobs were going away. I had no problem with someone in India getting a good job but I began to have a real problem with what I would call “injustices” with the way the whole process was handled at this end. In the movies, when the detective is trying to figure out who committed the crime, he always asks, “Who benefits?” Well, I started asking the same question about outsourcing, and I didn’t like the answer.

I didn’t benefit, unless getting to keep your job so that you can fire other people is a benefit, and the people I had to terminate sure didn’t benefit. The people offshore seemed to benefit but I had the sneaking suspicion that life wasn’t all that rosy for those guys in Bangalore. And that left the guys at the top, the guys paid in stock options, the guys whose jobs were never going away. It seemed to me to be the classic “power corrupts” situation, applied to the so-called me-generation: If you can make money, it’s okay to treat people like commodities.

I really hated to be party to all that, helping the rich get richer; but I was so near to retirement that I didn’t have the courage to quit. I stuck it out, got migraines, and told myself that the unfortunate soul on the other side of the desk was lucky to have me firing them rather than someone else who might actually get a kick out of it.

One day, I got the idea to fix all the world’s problems. And I did.

I wrote a book - fiction of course. It was a murder mystery based on the whole outsourcing/globalization fiasco that was ruining people’s lives here. I created a make-believe company with imaginary people and spent evenings and weekends writing, trying to be to the information technology industry what John Grisham has been to the legal profession, trying to show its inherent meanness, and make the evildoers pay, so to speak.

When it was finished, several well-known people in the publishing business gave me very positive feedback...told me how the story needed to be told and that I was the one to tell it, said I was going to have a breakout novel, etc. etc. Making a five-year long story short, I couldn’t find an agent, and couldn’t get a publisher to take the risk on a new writer with a genre-bending idea (came close with one but the economy pulled the rug out from under me just as I was getting in the door). I found out through the course of all the rejections, re-writes, writers’ conferences, blogs, interviews and personal conversations with writers, agents and managing editors, that the old saying about needing experience to get a job and needing a job to get experience, was also true for writing. You need to have published to get a publisher.

So I gave up, sort of.

I had a full-fledged novel ready to take flight into the marketplace and no way to get it there...no traditional way anyway. But having spent so many years working with technology, I knew that the traditional business model was going the way of the dodo.

So...I decided to take a stab at on-demand online publishing. My book has finally hit the bookstands, the cyber-bookstands; and the irony of it is that I'm actually very at home with managing a web site, an e-Store, a blog, email marketing, and the online design of promotional materials.

Who’d have thought it. The fish knows how to swim and the water looks fine.

Whether or not I succeed in making a splash remains to be seen. But I am grateful for the chance that technology has given this artsie to tell the story that needs to be told.